THE EFFECT OF ANODIZING SOLUTION TYPE AGAINST THE COATING THICKNESS AND WEAR RATE OF ALUMINUM 6061

Aluminum is metal that mild and has a fairly high mechanical strength. It is widely used in automotive industry, aircraft industry, but, aluminum has disadvantage which is low wear resistance. Development of methods for improving the wear rate can be conducted by using anodizing method. The study aimed to obtain accurate and detail information that needed to support the wear rate analysis results using anodizing solution of sulfuric acid and phosporic acid. The method used in this study was using experimental testing with variations of voltage and immersion time on solution type of sulfuric acid and phosporic acid. Analysis of the test results obtained from the thickness test, wear rate test and microstructure test by using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). SEM was used to characterize the microstructure of coating on aluminium that resulted from anodizing process.SEM was conducted on specimen that had the lowest and the highest value of wear rate. According to the resultsobtained that voltage and time of anodizing affected the wear rate of aluminium 6061. The more time and voltage of anodizing, the lower the wear rate value, thus the wear resistance of aluminium improved 14 times higher than the wear resistance of base metal.