真空鋳造による高分散ナノカーボン/Al複合材料の作製と評価

抄録

In recent years, increasing CO₂ emission has become a serious issue. In order to reduce CO₂ emissions, the weight of body such as vehicle has been reduced, so new lightweight and high strength materials are needed. Therefore, the purpose of this study is synthesis of a material with excellent mechanical properties. We focused on aluminum with high specific strength and nanocarbon with amazing mechanical properties. The normal casting process is difficult to fabricate a specimen because Aluminum and nanocarbon chemically react with each other, so it is an untapped study field. In this study, normal casting conditions are changed. Using Al powder as a base material, nanocarbon is highly dispersed by ultrasonic waves, and a nanocarbon/Al composite powder is cast at a temperature of 933[K] under a vacuum of about 1.5×10^-3[Pa] to fabricate a specimen, and evaluate mechanical property of material and analyze structure. The obtain main results as follows: from X-ray diffraction and FT-IR analysis, it was found that Aluminum chemically reacts with nanocarbon to produce Al₄C₃. Vickers hardness of specimen increased up about 26 % for 0.5 wt% CNT and about 19% for 2.0 wt% C₆₀ in comparison with the value of pure Aluminum specimen. Also tensile strength and flexural strength of nanocarbon/Al composite specimen decrease with the value of pure Aluminum specimen. These results show that it is necessary to search for conditions under which Al₄C₃ is not producted in order to impart the composite effect of nanocarbon. In the future, research will be conducted under different conditions to study the effectiveness of the development of nanocarbon/Al composite casting materials.