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Wear behavior of the raw and pre-smashed carbon nanotubes reinforced 6061Al composites fabricated by powder metallurgy

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Abstract

The raw and pre-smashed (PS) carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced 6061Al composites (CNT/6061Al) with different CNT contents were respectively fabricated by powder metallurgy technology. It was found that reducing the CNT cluster size by pre-smashing processing could sharply reduce the friction coefficient, and significantly improve the density, hardness, and wear resistance of the CNT/6061Al composites. For the raw-CNT/6061Al composites, the wear rate increased approximately linear trend while the CNT content was over 1 wt.%. The plastic deformation, deep grooves, and serious delamination were presented on the wear surface. The wear process was gradually transformed from Al-copper base counterpart wear into Al-Al wear for the higher adhesion-binding energy between aluminum and copper base counterpart. While for the PS-CNT/6061Al composites, the wear rate gradually decreased as the CNT content increased from 0 to 2 wt.%. This was mainly because the generation of the thinner mechanically mixed layer (MML) and the PS-CNT prevented the direct contact between specimen and copper base counterpart, which effectively inhibited the adhesive wear. But excessive PS-CNT addition (∼3 wt.%) would weaken the bonding between CNT and 6061Al, and thus the wear resistance of the composite was reduced apparently.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shi-changxu Innovation Center for Advanced Materials, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    XiaoNan Li, ZhenYu Liu, YuNing Zan, BoLü Xiao, DingRui Ni, QuanZhao Wang, Dong Wang & ZongYi Ma

  2. School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Shenyang, 110016, China

    XiaoNan Li

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  1. XiaoNan Li
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  2. ZhenYu Liu
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  3. YuNing Zan
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  4. BoLü Xiao
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Correspondence to ZhenYu Liu or BoLü Xiao.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFB0703104), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS (Grant No. QYZDJ-SSW-JSC015), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51931009, 51871214, 51871215), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (Grant No. 2020197).

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Li, X., Liu, Z., Zan, Y. et al. Wear behavior of the raw and pre-smashed carbon nanotubes reinforced 6061Al composites fabricated by powder metallurgy. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 65, 1149–1159 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-020-1817-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-020-1817-3

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