Microstructure Exploration of the Aluminum-Tungsten Carbide Composite with different Manufacturing circumstances
In the last decade, as demand for high quality materials are increased, the development of lightweight aluminum (Al) also increased especially in aerospace and automotive industries. It has been well known that Al based metal matrix composites (MMCs) offers a very low thermal expansion coefficient, high specific strengths, wear and heat resistance as compared to conventional Al alloys. In order to combine all these properties, MMCs have become a very attractive method for various industrial applications. The interest in Tungsten Carbide (WC) as reinforcements for aluminum (Al) has been growing considerably. Efforts have been largely focused on investigating their contribution to the enhancement of the mechanical performance of the composites. The uniform dispersion of Tungsten Carbide in the Al matrix has been identified as being critical to the pursuit of enhanced properties. In this present research paper emphasis, the effect of Tungsten Carbide content on the Physical properties of the composites like SEM, XRD was investigated. The improvement of physical properties for composites of Al/WC has been compared with pure aluminum.
The wear properties of an SiC-whisker-reinforced aluminium composite
Abstract The wear behaviour of an SiC-whisker-reinforced aluminium (SiC w -Al) composite is studied by comparative testing. The experimental results show that the SiC w -Al composite exhibits a fairly good wear resistance, especially for higher sliding velocities and/or higher loads in the test. The results are considered to be due to the high hardness of the SiC whiskers, the rotation of the SiC whiskers and the constraint of the SiC whisker in the aluminium matrix. It is also discovered by experiment that during the wear of oxides the wear volume of both the SiC w -Al composite and the aluminium is small, but the wear volume of the former is a little larger than that of the latter. The reason may be that the compactness of the oxide on the surface of the specimen is damaged because of the existence of the SiC whiskers.
Creating the Virtual Universe
Simulation software is important to our understanding of the universe. The intrinsic multiphysics aspects are spiced with a range of temporal scales and spatial scales, both of which cover more digits than are available in the standard hardware. This, together with the intrinsic chaotic nature of many physical processes, poses quite a challenge. To meet this challenge, researchers developed the Astronomical Multipurpose Environment (AMUSE). Instead of writing a suite of multiphysics solvers from scratch, AMUSE's developers coupled existing solvers for each physical ingredient. The result is a highly inhomogeneous collection of dedicated solvers with a homogeneous protocol that scales to supercomputers.