Nano titanium carbide particle reinforced aluminum composite materials prepared by ball milling followed by reactive sintering

The development of the aviation industry requires the use of new metallic materials with superior specific mechanical properties compared to existing materials. In particular, the metal matrix composites (MMC) reinforced by nano-particles draw attention due to their excellent machinability. However, it is well-known that handling nanoparticles in industry is problematic due to respect of safety rules regarding nanomaterials. In order to overcome this problem, we have demonstrated the feasibility to fabricate nanocomposite materials without using any starting nanoparticles. We studied the ternary system aluminum/carbon/titanium for which we have shown the possibility to create the nanoparticles of titanium carbide by a flash sintering. So, we fabricated the titanium carbide (TiC) nano particles reinforced aluminum matrix (Al−nano TiC) composite, and demonstrated that the size of TiC nanoparticles could be controlled by both heating rate and dwell temperature. We observed a very narrow size distribution of particles, ranging from 25 to 90 nm. Observation by transmission electron microscopy revealed that the TiC nanoparticles were individually distributed in Al−nano TiC composite and that the Al/nano TiC interface was intimate. Tensile tests have been performed on specimens with various TiC contents. It was found that the ultimate tensile strength of the Al−34 vol% nano TiC composite was higher than 600 MPa with a failure elongation of 4.2 %. The observed ridge of pure Al on the fracture surface implies that pure Al contributes to the conservation of a remarkable failure elongation of the Al−nano TiC composite. The elongation reaches 7.2 % with the TiC volume fraction of 27 %.