Mechanical and microstructural characterization of AA6061 reinforced with SiC particles

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Abstract

 AA 6061 reinforced with four different volume fractions of SiCp (5, 10, 15, and 20% ) were produced by powder metallurgy processing using hot compaction (HC) temperature ranging from 400-500ºC. The effect of HC temperature and the volume fraction of the SiC reinforcement were investigated for the degree of consolidation, hardness profile, and microstructural evolutions. Microhardness measurement were taken to assess the variation in hardness across the diameters of the disks and following a rectilinear grid pattern to give color-coded maps of the hardness distributions. The highest Vickers hardness results were produced for AA6061 reinforced with 15% SiC. Increasing SiC volume fraction impeded grain boundaries diffusion, which resulted in lower grain coarsening of the AA6061 matrices. Comparing the relative densities and Vickers hardness of the hot compacted samples, the HC temperatures ranging from 400 -500 ºC had insignificant influence on the densification and hardness results.