Shock Consolidation of Aluminium Powder with SiC Fibre Reinforcement

For the explosive compaction of Al 2024 alloy powder the influence of E/M ratio and detonation velocity of the explosive as well as the influences of powder microhardness and initial density are discussed. With a choice of parameters tthat gives a fully compacted aluminium sample the results of embedding single SiC fibres are described and a procedure to avoid fibre cracking due to shock loads is derived. First results for the compaction of samples with 38% fibre content are presented.