Statistical analysis and ANN modelling of tribological performance of aluminium hybrid composites fabricated by PM method

Abstract This study represents the wear behaviour of the aluminium hybrid composites developed through powder metallurgy. The pure Al-matrix powder was blended with Si 3 N 4 /ZrO 2 ceramic powders in a high-centrifugal ball mill and then compacted at three different compaction pressure. The sintering of the composites was done in an environment-controlled tube furnace at 500 °C for 1 h. The effect of wt% of the reinforcement, compaction pressure and applied load was investigated on the wear results performed on the pin-on-disc setup. The Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and artificial neural network (ANN) was used for the wear loss results prediction. The ANOVA results revealed that load is a highly influential parameter for wear loss followed by reinforcement and compaction pressure. Furthermore, an ANN model using feed-forward backpropagation analysis was built which found that the predicted and experimental results are close.