Abrasive wear behaviour of SiC/2014 aluminium composite

Aluminium alloy matrix reinforced with 15 wt% SiC particles were prepared by powder metallurgy (PM) method. Wear behaviour of the composite was investigated to find out effects of operating variables and hardness in terms of the Taguchi approach, on a pin-on-disc machine and compared with the previous work on the composite produced by liquid metallurgy method [1]. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was also employed to investigate which design parameters significantly affected the wear behaviour of the composite. The results showed that abrasive grain size exerted the greatest effect on the abrasive wear, followed by the hardness, which supported the previous work, but the percentage contribution was very different. The percentage contributions of the grain size and hardness were about 81.57 and 11.09, respectively. This might be because of production method of PM, particle size, model used by not considering the interaction effects, and testing condition. Moreover, larger particle sizes of the composites showed more wear resistance than those of others. As for the case of earlier work the percentage contributions of the grain size and type of material (hardness) were about 29.90, 17.90, respectively. However, the percentage contribution of interaction of abrasive size and hardness was about 30.90 while interaction of other factors was pooled.