Improvement of tribological properties of Al alloy with CNTs and Nb nanopowder for industrial application

Abstract

Abstract Unreinforced Al alloy lacks adequate tribological property required in service. To improve on this property, it must be reinforced with materials having good wear properties. Hence, Al was reinforced with CNTs and Nb and consolidated with spark plasma sintering (SPS). The wear experiment was conducted on a ball-on-disc Tribometer where loads of 10 N, 20 N and 30 N were systematically applied. The coefficients of friction (COF) of the sintered samples were subsequently obtained. The samples were weighed before and after each run to determine their weight losses which were used to compute their wear volumes. The experiment was designed and analyzed with Taguchi and ANOVA. Results showed that Al-8CNTs-8Nb composite had the best wear characteristics. Its COF got improved by 79% which shows that it is suitable for industrial applications.