Weight reduction often competes against wear and corrosion issues when it comes to lightweight metals. Aluminum and its alloys are widely used in different industrial applications, e.g., aerospace, automotive and machinery. Additive manufacturing methods of Al-alloys can lead to further weight reduction. Promising candidates for highly improved mechanical properties are aluminum matrix composites (AMCs), where ceramic particles are reinforced in an aluminum matrix.

Unique mechanical properties like high strength and thermal stability of the AC-Albolon® (AMC) material from Advanced Composite Corporation enable lightweight materials applications, where high rigidity and shape control are required.

While powder-based 3D printing techniques are limited to the existing powder material and mostly bear high machinery costs by producing high amount of powder waste, the novel liquid metal printing (LMP) technique, developed by GROB Werke GmbH, enables 3D printing using any existing Aluminum wire material without wasting materials and by low machinery costs.

Ceranod’s PEO is an environmentally friendly technique which leads to highly wear and corrosion resistant surfaces on lightweight metals [1]. To unveil further potentials of novel material groups and increasing their use case range, an ULTRACERAMIC® PEO (plasma electrolytic oxidation) refinement was applied to different material groups of LMP and AMC materials.

PEO refined advanced Al alloys were tested under dry sliding conditions using a pin-on-disc system. The coefficient of friction and the wear rate of refined and blank samples were investigated. Initial studies reported a 1000x decrement in wear volume of PEO protected surfaces in comparison to blank samples, which might lead to an extended range of application of these novel lightweight materials. Further investigation was performed on the surface properties in combination of loading variations of the tests, while the wear of the counter body was taken into account to understand the whole tribological system.

Supporting measurements are presented by hardness tests, SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS) and Laser scanning Microscopy (LSM). ELB would like to thank GROB-WERKE GmbH & Co. KG for providing LMP samples.

[1]  M. Sowa, M. Wala, A. Blacha-Grzechnik, A. Maciej, A. Kazek-Kęsik, A. Stolarczyk, W. Simka, Corrosion Inhibitor-Modified Plasma Electrolytic Oxidation Coatings on 6061 Aluminum Alloy, Materials (Basel) 14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/ma14030619.