Tensile behaviour of carbon fibre reinforced aluminium matrix composites

Carbon fibre reinforced aluminium matrix composite, having 16 vol. percent of the fibres, was prepared by powder metallurgy technique. The composite exhibited a tensile strength of 177 MPa in comparison with the UTS of 88 MPa for the unreinforced aluminium matrix. To improve the wettability and consequently the UTS of the composite, the preforms were hot pressed at higher temperature (675 degrees C) in liquid state and the fibres were electroplated with nickel. Al-l wt.% Ph and 7010 P/M aluminium alloys were the two matrixes under investigation. Optimized hot pressing parameters and SEM fractography have indicated that these efforts result in improvement in the wettability. However, the UTS of the composite was found to decrease in all these cases. In the paper, these investigations have been discussed