Study on friction welding wear and hot deformation behavior of AZ31B magnesium alloy and nano composite

Abstract

Reducing the weight is one of the key factors in the manufacturing of structural application materials to reduce the green house gas emissions Recently magnesium has its application in consumer products automotive and aerospace industries The density of magnesium alloys ranges from 1 74 to 1 83 g cc A wide variety of alloy elements are used to suit different range of applications The most important alloying ingredients used in magnesium alloys are aluminum zinc manganese silicon zirconium rare earth metals and strontium Researchers have also experimented by adding calcium and copper to enhance the oxidation resistance and strength Taking the above into consideration new AZ31B magnesium alloys were developed by reinforcing calcium and nano alumina This research work was carried out to elucidate the material behavior during secondary processing friction welding and hot deformation behavior and to study the wear behavior for the magnesium alloy and nano composite Friction welding was carried out first to predict the tensile behavior and the microstructural evolution of the magnesium nano composite of weldments The preliminary experiments were conducted on the composite and the tensile strength of the welded samples yielded only around 75 Inorder to get the optimal strength the experimental design was conducted using central composite design using design expert software For the obtained parameters the welds were performed on the pure AZ31B magnesium alloy Using response surface methodology the optimal tensile strength was evolved and the same has been validated with artificial neural network