Experimental Approach to Optimize Hardness of Aluminum Hybrid Composites through Taguchi Analysis

Abstract

Hybrid aluminum metal matrix composites (HAMMC) were fabricated using liquid fabrication technique namely stir casting with three reinforcements Alumina, Boron Carbide and Silicon Carbide added to Aluminum alloy 6061. This paper focuses on Taguchi optimization technique to analyze the significant parameters of stir casting to evaluate hardness properties of HAMMC. For this reason, stir casting was utilized with different process parameters based on three-level of L9 Taguchi, the signal-to-noise (S/N) and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to find the optimum levels and to evaluate the effect of process parameters on hardness properties. The results show that some of the process parameters have significant effect on hardness by comparing with other three sintering factors, the varying proportions of reinforcements added to the metal matrix gave the most significant effect on the hardness.