Investigation on friction stir welded Az31b sic and az31b al2o3 nano composite joints

Abstract

Conventional materials used in automobile, aircraft and shipbuilding industries such as steel, aluminium, copper etc., fall short to meet the ever increasing demand to enhance the product features particularly the requirement of weight reduction of the products. As weight reduction factor has direct influence on fuel economy, this demand has become very sensitive to these industries. Hence industries are searching for alternative materials that would be lighter in weight and provide the required properties that the industrial applications demand. As a solution for this demand, Magnesium (Mg) could be an excellent choice of alternative lighter material to replace the present heavy metals, because of its outstanding properties such as low density (1740 Kg/m3) and high strength to weight ratio. In addition, magnesium is having many favorable properties like excellent castability, machinability, weldability, recyclability, very high thermal conductivity along with extraordinary corrosion and oxidation resistance. There is an increasing demand for welding and other joining processes of magnesium and its alloys as they find wide applications in industries such as automotive body structure building, structural replacement of aircraft and shipbuilding works. More specifically magnesium alloy is an excellent replacer of steel and aluminum alloy of car inner door panel structures, roof structures and chases structures. If conventional welding processes are followed for joining of magnesium alloys, the weld joints suffer from problems like alloy segregation, hot cracking, and porosity in the welded zones which reduce the mechanical properties. newline