Mechanical and Microstructural Evaluation of InsituAluminium Titanium Boride Composite Processed by Severe Plastic Deformation

Nanostructured and ultrafine grained metallic materials have received great attention in recent times because of their unique mechanical, physical properties and high performance. High specific strength of the material is critical for many structural applications in automotive and aerospace design. Different techniques for producing ultra-fine-grained (UFG) materials have been introduced especially in the last decade. Severe plastic deformation (SPD) is one such process to obtain ultrafine grains wherein simple shear stress is applied to a billet during multiple passages through an angled channel of constant cross section. One of such process is equal channel angular pressing (ECAP), which is widely used than any other SPD technique to obtain fine grains. The process is capable of generating very large plastic strains that significantly refines the microstructure without altering the external dimension of the billet and therefore has attracted the attention of a number of researchers underlining the potentials to scale up for industrial applications.In this paper an attempt is made to highlight the significance of severe plastic deformation of insitualuminium titanium boride composite. The composite was processed up to 2 passes following Bc route of ECAP. The hardness, ultimate tensile strength with varied reinforcement content of the ECAP samples were found to be significantly high as compared to ascast matrix alloy. While the microstructure analysis revealed progressive refinement of grains after every pass of ECAP.