Preliminary evaluations on development and material selection of high temperature vacuum casted marble dust-reinforced silicon-bronze alloy material for bearing applications

Abstract

Development and selection of an adequate bearing material with distinct characteristics for wear resistant applications is one of the most crucial tasks. Inappropriate selection of material may cause hindrance and result in failure of components during its functioning. To this end, this research focusses on fabrication of bearing materials reinforced with varying weight percentages of industrial waste, i.e. marble dust, and the physical, mechanical and tribological characteristics were determined. The proportions of marble dust were varied from 0 wt. % to 10 wt. % with a gap of 2.5 wt. % and filled in a silicon-bronze alloy. The physical and mechanical properties were realized by the Archimedean principle, micro-hardness tester and Instron 3369 universal testing machine respectively. The tribological properties such as friction and wear behaviour were determined utilizing pin-on-disk tribometer under different condition at normal room temperature. Due to the conflicting nature of desired properties in a bearing material, the Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenjemeaning under fuzzy environment was applied to rank and select the optimal composite among available alternatives because it can obtain compromise solution considering overall satisfaction and regret of the selection of the wrong provinces. From the analysis of the results, it was found that silicon-bronze-3 marble dust bearing material containing 7.5 wt. % marble dust achieved the best possible set of the properties for wear resistant applications.