Enhancement of mechanical properties of Al-Cu alloy composite reinforced by Ni element: A combination of mixture design of experiment and artificial neural network approach

The high practicality of Al-Cu alloy is the key reason it is highly used across most industries. In this research, the primary objective was to optimize the mechanical properties of the aluminum-copper alloy by incorporating Ni nanoparticles. The study employed a combination of Ni nanoparticles with the alloy and utilized a mixture design of experiments to determine the most effective Al-Cu-Ni alloy composition. This composition was validated through molecular dynamics simulation. Mechanical tests were carried out on the Al-6 %Cu-1 %Ni alloy at different strain rates and temperatures. The findings indicated that an increase in temperature led to a reduction in tensile properties. Moreover, the strength of the Al-6 %Cu-1 %Ni alloy increased with higher strain rates while the stiffness remained relatively constant. Additionally, a specialized deep neural network with two hidden layers was employed to predict the mechanical properties of the Al-Cu-Ni alloy. The optimal parameters for this deep neural network were determined using the Taguchi method. [Display omitted]