Reinforcement surface treatment effects on interface characteristics and mechanical properties of Al/SiC composites

Abstract

Aluminum metal composites have been actively researched for over 20 years because they can solve low rigidity, strength, hardness and high-temperature characteristics, which is the limit of aluminum while maintaining a low weight, which is the advantage of aluminum alloys. When using carbide-based ceramics as reinforcements in the fabrication of aluminum metal matrix composites, the performance improvement of the composites is superior to that of the other series ceramic reinforcements. However, it is difficult to control the interface at the time of manufacturing the carbide-based reinforcement material, so that the complexity of the composite manufacturing process is increased and the physical properties are also lower than expected. In this study, to overcome this phenomenon, the surface silicon carbide reinforcement is controlled by thermal oxidation under various conditions. After controlling the interface, the interfacial microstructure analysis was performed to analyze the characteristics of the fabricated composites. Hardness, abrasion resistance, tensile properties were measured to investigate mechanical properties and neutron diffraction is performed to investigate interaction between reinforcement and matrix metal.