Studies on formability of sintered aluminum composites during hot deformation using strain hardening parameters

Formability is the limit to which a material can be deformed before failure and is upmost importance in powder metallurgy (PM) forming process. This is because the presence of porosity in the PM part after the sintering process. In this study two key strain hardening parameters are used to study the workability behavior or determining the failure zone. This can be used for design of PM parts and most importantly the die design as repressing needs to be employed before pores appear as cracks on the free surface. It is nearly impossible to produce defect free parts if this failure occurs. The hot formability behavior of aluminum metal matrix composites (MMC's) that is, Al-4TiC, Al-4WC, Al-4Fe3C and Al-4Mo2C (by weight percentage) are presented in this paper.