Machinability Study of Aluminium Metal Matrix Composite (Al6061 - SiC)

Abstract

MMC’s are the materials that are playing a vital
role in today’s automobile and aeronautical
applications. The present materials are almost
getting replaced by these MMC’s, specially by
aluminium MMC’s. These materials provide the
advantage of light weight to higher strength
which is of most important for the aerospace
components. The most common aluminium
MMCs are Aluminium 6061 material reinforced
with SiC. Machining of these materials is a
challenging task due to its improved mechanical
properties like hardness and strength. So, an
appropriate machining technique should be
suitable selected depending upon the application
of the material. In machining, turning operation
is selected to study the influence of the cutting
parameters in machining the processed MMC’s.
The results of the present study indicate that the
cutting parameters like speed and feed rate
affects the performance of the tool and the depth
of the parameter is the one which has lesser
impact.