Density, hardness and wear responses of aluminium-copper-magnesium alloys

Currently, alloys are extensively used in industrial applications due to better tribological properties. There are wide ranges of applications of aluminium based alloys in the field of the Automobile Industry, Defence, etc. The purpose of this work is to fabricate and investigate the enhancement of the properties of the Aluminium-Copper-Magnesium alloy which is manufactured through the powder metallurgy (P/M) process. Although alloy can be fabricated by ingot metallurgy (I/M), the powder metallurgy route offers a cost-saving likened to the ingot metallurgy (I/M) approach for the reason that closer-to-net shape parts can be made and also in ingot metallurgy, where cooling from the molten state is relatively slow, resulting in workability problems and other limitation like segregation defect. In the final product, the fine microstructure can be achieved as powder particles are very small and uniform and hence mechanical properties are enhanced. The experimental design was done using an L9 orthogonal array where three input parameters namely composition (weight percentage of Aluminium-CopperMagnesium), compaction pressure, and sintering temperatures are selected as it is evident from the preliminary experiments. Different types of mechanical tests like density, hardness, and tribological tests like wear test are performed on the alloy of Aluminium-Copper-Magnesium (Al-Cu-Mg) where each test produced significant results. Keeping in view of the industry needs, a comparative analysis has been carried out. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Materials and System Engineering.