Abrasive wear of aluminium alloys rubbed against sand

This investigation analyses the wear behaviour of aluminium-based alloys in contact with abrasive sand particles. A simple wear tester was developed. Linear variation of mass loss against travel distance was found. The influence of the sand type, incident angle and travel distance on the wear behaviour was studied.Wear rate increased with incident angle. The mass loss was three times faster when using 45° as incident angle instead of 0°.It was also observed that when tests were conducted with normalized abrasive sand (NAS) instead of standard pit sand (SPS), the wear rate was accelerated.Furthermore, no obvious correlation between hardness and wear was found. In fact, work hardening of 5xxx aluminium alloy does not ameliorate wear resistance. Whereas heat treatment hardening of 7xxx aluminium alloy can improve wear resistance. In addition, chemical composition can be more important than the hardness to define material wear resistance; i.e. for the same hardness, Al–Zn–Mg alloy has a better wear resistance than Al–Mg alloy.