Experimental Evaluation of Piston using Aluminium Alloy (LM24) Reinforced with SIC and Graphite

Aluminium has a huge stipulation in the field of automobile, aerospace and other versatile engineering applications in order to embellish the requirement in those areas. But this technological progress needs something new other than aluminium. Metal matrix composite (MMC) can be an answer to that issue. In this study, Aluminium LM24 alloy is taken as a base matrix material, whereas silicon carbide and graphite particulate is used as reinforcement. Stir casting technique, which is a liquid state process, is used for the fabrication of the MMCs. Four different MMC specimens were produced with 5% SIC and 5% graphite, 6.5% SIC and 3.5% graphite, 7.5% SIC and 2.5% graphite are used as samples. Mechanical properties like tensile strength and hardness are studied on the fabricated composite specimens. Morphological studies are also studied on the tested samples using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to observe the bonding between the matrix and reinforcements. The results were plotted and graphically presented to express those materials characteristics. From the tensile results, it is observed that the strength increased with increase in reinforcement percent, thereby decrease in elongation percent. Hardness also increased with reinforcement percent in the composite sample. In this investigation, we prepared a piston with reinforced composition of Group-2 (6.5% SIC and 3.5% graphite). This prepared piston is made to run on a diesel engine and evaluated the performance characteristics of a diesel engine.