Analysis of Tribological Behaviour of Functionally Graded LM13 Aluminium/TiS2 Composite Using Design of Experiments

Functionally graded LM13 aluminium/10wt% TiS2 composite was fabricated by centrifugal casting method and hollow cylindrical part has the dimension of 150x150x20 mm was obtained. The microstructural evaluation and vicker’s micro-hardness test was carried out on the surfaces at the distance of 1, 6, 12 and 18 mm from the outer surface of functionally graded composites. The microstructural investigation reveals that the TiS2 reinforcement particles concentrated more on the outer periphery and less at the inner periphery of the composite. The hardness of the composite surface increases at the particle rich region of outer periphery and decreases towards inner region. The dry sliding wear experiments were conducted on the composite specimens as per plan of Taguchi’s L16 orthogonal array design. The parameters considered were load, sliding velocity, sliding distance and distance from outer periphery of the composite, varied for four levels. Signal- to- Noise ratio and Analysis of Variance were carried out and the significance test revealed that distance from outer periphery had major impact (43.11 %) followed by sliding distance (31.19 %), load (16.59 %), and sliding velocity (7.33 %). Adequacy of model was predicted through regression equation and the error was found to be less than 8 %. The scanning electron microscope analysis carried out for the worn-out surfaces showed maximum wear resistance of the functionally graded composite at outer periphery.