The challenges that automotive industry is experiencing now, dictate a necessity in design and production of new generation of materials, increasing its life cycles stability in the aggressive environment, cost-efficiency, and technological simplicity. It seems that use of composites materials would meet these demands, but in the most cases, it increases the technological challenge of its production and having relatively high cost.
Our main target is to design and produce the materials with high functionality and having cost-efficient production.
We think that combination of Al and AlB6 or B4C composites looks very promising to resolve this issue.
Very low density of 2.3 g/cm3 – 2.5g/cm3 with high strength and satisfactory ductility makes these composites attractive to the automotive and aerospace industries. The presence of AlB6 or B4C leads to increasing of corrosion and erosion resistance.
Al-AlB6 master alloy with not more than 10 weight percent of AlB6 is already well known and exists on the market. All known methods of alloys production do not allow to obtain stable compositions with high percentage of AlB6, especially, if the goal is to get 50% to 50% of each component.
Plasma Spark Sintering and High Voltage Powder Consolidation processes are very efficient for these purposed due to low temperatures in the flexible load; and use of them creates an opportunity to obtain the composite with much higher percentage of AlB6.
We are looking for partners for this research and development project. It could bring a new vision and innovation to create new materials for automotive industry.
