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2015
Conference Paper
Titel
Nanocarbons in aluminium alloys for automotive applications - advantages, challenges and outlook
Abstract
-More and more automobile manufacturing companies are introducing advanced smart materials within their production lines. The reasons is, that the car manufacturers have to reduce the weight of the automobiles to fulfil strict fuel economy requirement in order to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, while the demands of the consumers for improved safety, advanced electronic systems for interior comforts, navigation and entertainment would lead to a raised weight. To meet these challenges, car manufacturers are turning to light weight metals as a solution. Besides reducing mass, using advanced metal-matrix composites (MMC) can also provide improved reliability and efficiency. - Recent advances in carbon nanotubes (CNT) synthesis and their relative comparable costs have opened the opportunity for the inclusion of CNTs to improve current technologies by increasing their mechanical performance. - The field of surface modification appears as quite promising and it is open to innovation for attenuating the drawbacks on wettability and the tendency to agglomerating of nanoparticles. Coating carbon species with various metal or metal oxide coating, not only improves interfacial interaction between carbon filler and matrix material but also protects the carbon filler material from thermal degradation during the processing of MMCs. - As higher quality and reproducible nano carbons are becoming more prominent, the concept of using them as filler material for specific purposes is being investigated more intensively. The demand is increasing and has been predicted to increase further dramatically in the next 20 years. - This development coupled with improved compounding methods either via liquid (casting), semi solid (rheocasting) solid (powder metallurgy) will push for high production output and thus increase supply. - Improvements in mechanical properties such as impact strength have reached over 300% of that of the base material. - Electrical conductivity has been improved to over 141% IACS via electrolytic deposition.