Challenge resulting from the preparation of metallic hybrid materials

The preparation of monolithic metallic materials for ongoing metallographic analysis is common practice. However, it is more complicated to generate polished sections of material hybrids. These difficulties result from different material characteristics in terms of mechanical stress (abrasion during grinding and polishing) and from chemical reactions during ongoing etching. Nevertheless, material composites are increasingly being requested and used in the scientific domain and in industry. In order to characterize and test the quality of these material composites, especially of the joint, these composites are subjected to metallographic investigation. For this reason, it is necessary to adapt the metallographic procedures appropriately. This paper looks at the characterization of the aluminium-iron system and the possibly formed intermetallic phases that may occur in it, as well as the multi-component system in alloys. The resulting challenges are emphasized. Afterwards, a procedure to generate high-quality results for the analysis of the composite, from the polished section up to the image gained from scanning electron microscopy (SEM), is elucidated.