Friction Stir Processing of Recycled Titanium Reinforced A356 Composite Developed Through Stir Casting

Titanium is a well-known material which is highly used in manufacturing now a days. The extracts coming out during manufacturing, especially machining chips, are a big issue for the industries. Effective reusage of such extracted material to enable a green, circular manufacturing process is a challenge of this decade. While researchers are working on various ways of reusing the machined chips, this research work attempts employing ball milling to break the chips into refined powder which is subsequently used as reinforcement to strengthen cast A356 Aluminum alloy. The developed composite is subjected to friction stir processing to understand the strengthening ability of the reinforcement during severe plastic deformation processing of the material. Microstructural characterization is performed using optical and electron microscopes. Mechanical properties of the material are evaluated using micro-indentation hardness testing and tensile testing. Results indicate that addition of Titanium up to 5% leads to better performance in terms of strength and ductility. Better compatibility between the matrix and reinforcement due to the metallic nature and closer atomic properties of Titanium reinforcement is found to be the major reason for significant improvement in the performance of the developed composite. Intense microstructural characterization and mechanical evaluation are presented in this paper to correlate the structure-property relationship of the developed material.