Dry sliding wear performance on self-healing Al6061 composites

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the tribological performance of the developed self-healing Al6061 composite and to optimize the operating conditions for enhanced tribo-performance of the developed material.Design/methodology/approachA unique procedure has been adopted to convert the sand casted Al6061 into self-healing material by piercing a low melting point solder material with and without MoS2. Taguchi-based L9 orthogonal array has been used to optimize the number of experiments and analyze the influence of operating parameters such as speed, sliding distance and load on material wear.FindingsThe results reveal that the paper shows the self-healing and self-repair is possible in metal through piercing low melting point alloy. Then, the load has a significant influence over other input parameters in predicting the wear behavior of developed material. Moreover, addition of MoS2 does not affect the tribo-performance of the developed material. The study concludes that the developed self-healing Al6061 has huge potential to be used in mechanical industry.Research limitations/implicationsThe concept of self-healing in metals are very challenging task due to very slow diffusion rate of atoms at room temperature. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to explore the other new techniques to create self-healing in metals.Practical implicationsThe self-healing materials had shown huge potential to be used in mechanical industry. The current investigation established a structural fabrication and testing procedure to understand the effects of various parameters on wear. The conclusion from the experimentation and optimization helps researchers to developed and create self-healing in metals.Originality/valueThe previous research works were not focused on the study of tribological property of self-healing metal composite. With the best of author’s knowledge, no one has reported tribological study, as well as optimization of parameters such as speed, load and sliding distance on wear in self-healing metals composite.