Impact of surface texturing on the tribological behaviour of aluminium-silicon (Al-Si/Al₂O₃) advanced composite under dry and lubricating conditions

Abstract

In the present work, modification of aluminum-silicon (Al-Si) alloy based advanced composite surface is performed using laser texturing (LT). Surface texturing (ST) with different patterns, i.e., dimple (T1), square (T2), triangular (T3), and line hatched (T4) textures are done on the alloy surface and its impact on the mechanism to reduce friction and wear are investigated. The tribo tests are conducted at 10 N load, Hertzian contact pressure (Pmax) 708.7 MPa, 1 mm stroke length, frequency 50 Hz and sliding distance (SD) up to 450 m. The tribological behavior of the non-textured surface (NTS) and textured surface (TS) are examined under dry sliding conditions (DSC) and two lubricating sliding conditions (LSC) comprising of virgin PAO-4 (Lube-1) and PAO-4 + 1 wt% graphene nanoplatelets (Lube-2). T2 texture reveals a 49.53%, 69.21% and 44.91% decrease in friction coefficient(COF) and 58.1%, 43.74% and 83.86% decrease in wear volume (WV) than the NTS for DSC, Lube-1 and,Lube-2, correspondingly. Results show that ST improved friction efficiency, and shortened the running-in period. The current study results help to provide in-depth interpretation of micro-texturing and its relationship w.r.t. tribological characteristics.