Investigation of Mechanical and Wear Behaviour of Al7075/SiC Composites Using Response Surface Methodology

This work studies the effect of reinforcement weight percentage (Wt.%SiC) on wear and mechanical behaviour of the aluminium 7075 composites produced by the powder metallurgy technique. The three different reinforcements weight percentage used in this study are to 5,10 and 15. The hardness and toughness values reveals that with an increment in weight percentage of reinforcement, the mechanical properties decreases because of the development of large and more number of pores and agglomerations. The composites wear behaviour is examined by the wear testing equipment. The selected tribological parameters for the study are reinforcement weight percentage, applied load and sliding distance at three levels. The Design of Experiments, Box-Behnken method is used to design the number of experiments. ANOVA is used to find the effect of input parameters on output responses. The response surface methodology confirms that sliding distance and reinforcement weight percentage are two parameters which mostly affects wear loss.