Wear Behaviour of Mg Alloy Reinforced with Aluminium Oxide and Silicon Carbide Particulates

Light weight metals like magnesium and its alloys are in more use these days in automotive & aerospace industries. Magnesium based hybrid structures which are combinations of magnesium and another material like Aluminium can offer optimal technical performance due to the favorable strength-weight ratio. Materials with improved tribological properties have become the pre-requisite of advanced engineering design. Metal matrix composites (MMCs) exhibit a unified combination of good tribological properties and high toughness of the interior bulk metal when compared with monolithic materials. Stir processing, a microstructure modification technique, has emerged as one of the processes used for fabrication of MMCs. Commercial cast or wrought type Mg-Al-Zn AZ-series alloys, such as AZ91 9 wt.% Al and 1 wt.% Zn, have been widely used in automobiles or electronic appliances. Tribological performance of the fabricated composite will be investigated using pin-on-disc wear & friction monitor. In this paper, a novel approach of making hybrid preforms with two types of reinforcements, i.e., lowcost and different sized particles, for magnesium-based composites is planned. This paper investigates the wear behavior of magnesium alloy (similar to commercially available AZ91) based metal-matrix composites (MMCs) reinforced with Silicon Carbide (SiC) & Aluminium oxide (Al2O3) particulates during dry/wet sliding.