Development of Al7075 Reinforced with Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes for Strength Evaluation and FE Static Analysis of Idealized Brake Rotors

Abstract

The quest for the lighter materials have motivated the researchers worldwide to develop a newer composites. with the discovery of carbon nanotubes, a class of novel material it has been possible to fabricate the components for the field of automotive and aircraft industries where the strength to weight ratio becomes prominent. In the present work the Al7075 alloy was reinforced with the electroless Ni coated Multiwalled carbon nanotubes in 2wt%,4wt% and 6wt% the nanocomposites were prepared via die casting technique and the resulting composites were tested for the strength and hardness the tensile strength for 6wt% reinforcement found to be 240Mpa a 33% increase compared to unreinforced composite and micro hardness was as high as 61. The SEM analysis revealed that the improvements in the hardness could be attributed to the carbon atoms inclusion in composite lattices.The finite element analysis was carried out for the idealized composite commercial brake rotor the max stress bearing capacity was 172.74 N/mm2 and max deformation was 1.85x10-5 for the 6wt% of reinforcement. Keywords: nanocomposites, die casting, microhardness, aluminium brake rotors.