Additive Manufacturing of Aluminum‐Based Metal Matrix Composites—A Review

Abstract

Aluminum metal matrix composites (AMMCs) offer the potential to combine the advantages of both the aluminum alloys (low density and high ductility) and the reinforcements (high strength and high elastic modulus [EM]), therefore show superior specific strength, high specific stiffness, low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), and outstanding wear resistance. [1,2] Therefore, AMMCs meet the rapidly growing demand of advanced lightweight materials in many industrial areas such as automotive, aerospace, marine, and military. Traditionally, AMMCs are produced by two processing routes: melt processing or powder metallurgy. Although such composites are already in use in the aerospace and automobile sectors, many challenges in both melt and powder metallurgy processing routes prevent their widespread applications. The main challenges associated with the melt processing route are heterogeneous distribution of reinforcement leading to aggregation (due to the poor wettability of reinforcement), detrimental reactions at the interface (due to the high temperature of melt and a long dwell time of reinforcement in the melt), and difficulty in subsequent machining (due to the presence of hard second-phase particles). On the contrary, powder metallurgy processed AMMCs are prone to high levels of porosity and inferior mechanical properties leading to premature failure of the components. [3][4][5][6][7] In this context, additive manufacturing (AM) methods such as laser-based powder bed fusion (PBF-L), electron beam-based

Metallic Coatings through Additive Manufacturing: A Review

“…The high-dimensional stability obtained through this method whilst producing intricate and complex shapes makes it the most popular method in the metallic coating AM technologies. A wide range of printable powders (materials composition including Al-based [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ], Fe-based [ 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 ], Cu-based [ 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 ], Ni-based [ 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 ], Ti-based [ 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 ], Mo-based […”

Research progress on ceramic nanomaterials reinforced aluminum matrix nanocomposites

“…Properties of ceramic nanomaterial incorporated aluminium matrix nanocomposites can be manipulated and controlled by the appropriate selection of nanomaterials, controlling interface between reinforcement and matrix, and fabrication method. There are several review papers on aluminium or its alloy matrix composite materials have been published in the recent year [19,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56]. However, these review papers are mainly focused on various micro or nanoparticles other than ceramic nanoparticles.…”

Feedstock preparation, microstructures and mechanical properties for laser-based additive manufacturing of steel matrix composites

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