CERAMICS INTERNATIONAL Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Ceramics International 39 (2013) 6099–6106 Predicting Charpy impact energy of Al6061/SiC p laminated nanocomposites in crack divider and crack arrester forms Hesam Pouraliakbar a,c , Ali Nazari b,n , Pouriya Fataei b , Akbar Karimi Livary a , Mohammad Jandaghi c a Department of Advanced Materials, WorldTech Scientific Research Center (WT-SRC), Tehran, Iran b Department of Modeling and Simulation, WorldTech Scientific Research Center (WT-SRC), Tehran, Iran c Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Azadi Ave., Tehran, Iran Received 17 December 2012; received in revised form 9 January 2013; accepted 9 January 2013 Available online 1 February 2013 Abstract Charpy impact energy of the produced Al6061–SiC p laminated nanocomposites by mechanical alloying was modeled by adaptive neuro-fuzzy interfacial systems (ANFIS) in both crack divider and crack arrester configurations. The model was constructed by training, validating and testing of 171 gathered input–target data. The thickness of layers, the number of layers, the adhesive type, the crack tip configuration and the content of SiC nanoparticles were five independent input parameters utilized for modeling. The output parameter was Charpy impact energy of the nanocomposites. The performance of the proposed models was evaluated by absolute fraction of variance, the absolute percentage error and the root mean square error and the best values of 0.9945, 3.521 and 8.224, respectively acquired for them. The results introduced ANFIS as an influential tool for predicting the Charpy impact energy of the considered Al6061–SiC p laminate nanocomposites. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd and Techna Group S.r.l. All rights reserved. Keywords: A. Extrusion; Metal–matrix composites; Impact behavior; Modeling 1. Introduction Metal–matrix nanocomposites on the basis of aluminum and such hard reinforcements as nano-SiC have been widely considered in the recent scientific research on account of their appropriate properties which normally could not be present in many engineering structures. The main efforts have been conducted on providing such matrix that contains uniformly dispersed hard reinforce- ments. The produced homogenous structure will result in distinguished properties which make these materials useful even for aerospace science [1,2]. Among the proposed method to attain such uniform structure is high-energy mechanical milling and subsequent canning into suitable container to protect the produced nanocomposite powder from the possible environmental reaction. Afterwards, the densified powder is extruded to achieve the highest possible density and mechanical properties [2,3]. Al–SiC (nano)composites have been produced successfully by several researchers. Hanada et al. [4] Al–30 vol%-SiC composites showed excellent compressive properties such as yield stress, ultimate strength, and fracture strain. Those were produced by fine SiC particulates incorporated into an aluminum matrix by mechanical alloying. Structural and morphological aspects of Al–5 vol%SiC nanocomposite powder produced by mechanical alloying were considered by Khadem et al. [5] as a reasonable matrix. The results revealed the average particle size o10 nm and coefficient of variation o0.1 achievement by the increased milling time up to more than 10 h. Again mechanical alloying was employed by Hanada et al. [6] to disperse fine SiC particulates in an aluminum–lithium matrix powder. A homogenous distribu- tion of reinforcements had accquired finer grain structure ( o1 mm) to the aluminum–lithium nanocomposite as they claimed. El-Eskandarani [7], Woo and Zhang [8] and Lu et al. [9] were among the other researchers who studied www.elsevier.com/locate/ceramint 0272-8842/$ - see front matter & 2013 Elsevier Ltd and Techna Group S.r.l. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ceramint.2013.01.027 n Corresponding author. Tel.: þ 98 912 2208049. E-mail address: anazari@worldtech-src.com (A. Nazari).