Mechanical and Metallurgical behaviour of Aluminum/graphene nanocomposites in Fuselage applications

Abstract

The load bearing structure of airplane called fuselage has to sustain the continuous explosive and implosive stresses generated during time of flight in addition to load of passengers, fuel, cargo and engines. Use of high specific strength materials for such fuselage structure greatly reduces the emissions generated by air vehicles. In the current study, experimental investigations into the processing of Graphene Nanoplatelets (GNPs) reinforced AA2024 metal matrix composites through the fusion of mechanical alloying and stir casting technique by varying the GNPs content from 0 to 2 wt.% with an interval of 0.5 wt.%. The use of micro sized particles of aluminum (75 µm) as launching vehicle helps to carry and launch the nanoreinforcement into molten metal that assists in a uniform distribution by means of mechanical alloying. This helps us in achieving an ultimate tensile strength of 203 MPa for the sample of 1.5 wt.% GNPs. Microstructural evidences from Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) confirms the uniform distribution of GNPs in the metal matrix. Moreover, FESEM analysis on the graphene pull-out area over fractured surface elucidates an improvement in wettability between the reinforcement and metal matrix. While the X-ray diffraction analysis on the casted samples confirms that the composites are free from major contaminations and intermetallic phases.

Keywords:

• Aluminum nanocomposites
• graphene nanoplatelets
• stir casting
• fractography
• X-ray diffraction

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Swadesh Kumar Singh, Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology, India

SUBJECTS:

• Manufacturing Engineering
• Materials Science
• Production Engineering

Author contributions

Tarun Kumar Kotteda performed the experiments, collected the data, and wrote the original draft; Manoj Kumar defined the methodology; Pramod Kumar supervised the work; Ajay Gupta reviewed and edited the manuscript; Kalidindi Sita Rama Raju reviewed and edited the manuscript; all authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no data-sets were generated or analyzed during the current study.