Influence of Temperature on Mechanical Properties of AMCs

Abstract

This research focused on studying the effect of temperature on the mechanical properties of aluminium matrix composites (AMCs) obtained by a powder metallurgy route. Aluminium powder was milled at room temperature for 5 h and using different atmospheres in order to achieve different amounts of reinforcement. The atmospheres employed were vacuum, confined ammonia, and vacuum combined with a short-time (5 and 10 min) of ammonia gas flow. After mechanical alloying, powders were consolidated by cold uniaxial pressing (850 MPa) and vacuum sintering (650 °C, 1 h). Hardness and tensile tests, on consolidated samples, were carried out at room temperature. Subsequently, the effect of temperature on both properties were evaluated. On one hand, the UTS and hardness were measured, again at room temperature, but after having subjected the sintered samples to a prolonged annealing (400 °C, 100 h). On the other hand, the tensile and hardness behaviour were also studied, while the samples are at high temperature, in particular 250 °C for UTS, and in the range between 100 and 400 °C for hardness. Results show that the use of ammonia gas allows achieving mechanical properties, at room and high temperature, higher than those of the commercial alloys EN AW 2024 T4, and EN AW 7075 T6.