Investigation and Assessment of Mechanical Properties of Al-Fly Ash

Over the few decades, aluminum-based (Al) metal matrix composites (MMCs) have become more versatile replacement for ferrous alloys in automotive industry, aerospace field, and defense sectors. This is for the reason of its high specific strength, good wear resistance, and damping capacity when compared to unreinforced alloy. MMCs have been appeared as most suitable materials for automotive domain, aerospace, electronics filed, thermal, structural applications, and wear resistance applications to get their benefits over conventional materials. In this work, stir method of casting technique adopted in preparing Al-MMCs. Among various available reinforcements, fly ash is the one with lowest density, inexpensive, and accessible in large amounts as industrial waste. The Al-MMCs test samples were prepared using fly ash as reinforcement in various weight percentages 1, 2, and 4 into the AA1050 base metal. The different mechanical properties such as hardness—resistance to indentation, strength, and wear resistance were characterized by using universal testing machine (UTM), Vickers’s hardness, and pin-on-disk, and other experiments were executed by following ASTM standards. Factorial design methodology is followed to obtain the significant optimal parameters on wear rate, and the established relationship was authenticated using a technique known as analysis of variance (ANOVA). The developed AA1050-flyash composites results were promising and encouraging when compared to the base material.