Impact of surface texturing on the tribological behaviour of aluminium-silicon (Al-Si/Al 2 O 3 ) advanced composite under dry and lubricating conditions

Abstract In the present work, modification of aluminum-silicon (Al-Si) alloy based advanced composite surface is performed using laser texturing (L T ). Surface texturing (S T ) with different patterns, i.e., dimple (T 1 ), square (T 2 ), triangular (T 3 ), and line hatched (T 4 ) textures are done on the alloy surface and its impact on the mechanism to reduce friction and wear are investigated. The tribo tests are conducted at 10 N load, Hertzian contact pressure (P max ) 708.7 MPa, 1 mm stroke length, frequency 50 Hz and sliding distance (S D ) up to 450 m. The tribological behavior of the non-textured surface (N TS ) and textured surface (T S ) are examined under dry sliding conditions (D SC ) and two lubricating sliding conditions (L SC ) comprising of virgin PAO-4 (Lube-1) and PAO-4 + 1 wt% graphene nanoplatelets (Lube-2). T 2 texture reveals a 49.53%, 69.21% and 44.91% decrease in friction coefficient(COF) and 58.1%, 43.74% and 83.86% decrease in wear volume (W V ) than the N TS for D SC , Lube-1 and,Lube-2, correspondingly. Results show that S T improved friction efficiency, and shortened the running-in period. The current study results help to provide in-depth interpretation of micro-texturing and its relationship w.r.t. tribological characteristics.