Optimization of manufacturing copper-graphite composite for electrical contact applications using grey relational analysis

Abstract

Copper-graphite composite is one of the most important copper based composites, which is used, widely in electrical applications due to its excellent conductivity and high wear resistant. In this work, an attempt has been made to improve the multi-performance characteristics of copper graphite composite prepared by powder metallurgy and increase its expected life by optimizing the manufacturing process of this composite using statistical method. The experiments were carried out under various conditions of compacting pressure, sintering temperature and graphite content based on L9 orthogonal array. The experimental results indicated that multi-performance characteristics of the prepared composite such as electrical conductivity, densification and wear rate are influenced significantly by the studied parameters and the optimal process parameters level for optimum multi-performance characteristics was obtained in a compaction pressure of 750 MPa, sintering temperature of 950 °C and 10 Vol.-% of graphite content.