Fabrication, Experimental Investigation and Prediction of Wear Behavior of Open-Cell AlSi10Mg-SiC Composite Materials

Abstract

This research investigates the tribological behavior of advanced open-cell porous AlSi10Mg-SiC composites fabricated using the novel replication method of NaCl space holders. These composite materials have potential applications in lightweight and high-strength structures that require high resistance to friction and wear. The composites were tested using a pin-on-disk method under dry sliding-friction conditions at ambient temperature, with a sliding velocity of 1.0 m∙s−1 and an applied load of 50 N. The resulting wear parameters, including the coefficient of friction (COF) and mass wear, provided quantitative measures of the tribological behavior. Microstructural observations of the worn composite surfaces were carried out using scanning-electron microscopy (SEM) to study the wear mechanisms, and an elemental analysis was performed using X-ray energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) to examine the elemental composition. The results showed that the AlSi10Mg-SiC composites had lower mass wear and COF than the open-cell porous AlSi10Mg material under the same experimental conditions. Three different machine learning (ML) models were employed to predict the COF of the composites, and their performances were evaluated using the R2, MSE, RMSE, and MAE metrics on the validation and test sets.