Fracture toughness of nano-zirconia filled aluminum matrix composites: an experimental and numerical analysis

Abstract During the service life of components, they encounter several cyclic loadings that consequently generate stress which encourages crack interaction ultimately deteriorating materials’ performance. The present study aims to investigate the fracture behaviour of aluminium 6061 reinforced with 0–15 wt% ZrO 2 particles (at step of 5 wt%) fabricated using stir casting technique. Compositional analysis through x-ray diffraction was performed on the prepared composite samples. The fracture toughness of prepared composites is investigated through bending test by using single edge notch bend (SENB) specimens. In addition, the computation of fracture toughness was also performed by finite element analysis (FEA) approach, and the numerical results obtained from the FEA were compared with the experimental value. Furthermore, fractography and microstructural tests were carried out in order to investigate the influence of reinforcement weight percentage on the failure behaviour of the composites that had been prepared. The results show that with inclusion of ZrO 2 (15 wt%) in aluminum 6061 matrix the maximum fracture toughness of 500.83 MPa.mm 0.5 was observed. The study performed through FEA highlights the stress phenomena and result are in good agreement with the experimental results.