JOURNAL OF COMPOSITE MATERIALS Article Investigation of mechanical properties of nanostructured Al-SiC composite manufactured by accumulative roll bonding AF Meselhy 1 and MM Reda 2 Abstract To manufacture high-strength, fine dispersed and uniform distribution of Al-5vol.% SiC composite, accumulative roll bonding process is proposed and applied through this study. The microstructure illustrates and validates a good distri- bution of SiC reinforced in the Al 1050 matrix. It is found that after eight pass, the mean grain size of the composite sample is 188 nm. It can be concluded from tensile test that by increasing the number of passes the strengths of both Al ARBed and composite samples increase; however, their ductility decreases at the initial accumulative roll bonding pass and then increases. The tensile strength of Al-SiC composite sample is greater than the annealed Al 1050 used as the original raw material by five times. The strengthening of the proposed composite sample occurs due to grain refinement, uniformity, reinforcing role of particles, strain hardening, bonding quality and size of particles. From the hardness test, it is concluded that, after the initial pass, hardness increased quickly, then dwindled and finally saturated by further rolling. Observations discovered that the failure mode in the composite occurs due to the shear fracture. From the experi- mental investigation, governing equations are derived to describe the effect of the number of accumulative roll bonding passes on the tensile strength and elongation of manufactured metal matrix composite materials. It is found that the tensile strength and elongation can be described as an exponential function of the number of passes. Numerical results from these equations are more consistent with the experimental investigation. Keywords Nanostructured materials, Al-SiC structure, accumulative roll bonding, microstructure, mechanical properties Introduction A high specific stiffness and strength are the most important properties of aluminum alloys strengthened and reinforced with ceramic particulates. 1–3 Al-metal matrix composites (MMCs) with previous properties can be used in long-term applications, such as robots, aerospace, automotive engine, high-speed machinery, high-speed rotating shafts and metals reflect micro- waves, in which saving weight is an important feature. 4–6 Methods of fabrication of MMCs can be divided into two main sets: (a) solid state methods (such as, mechanical milling, powder metallurgy, etc.) 7,8 and (b) liquid state methods (such as stir casting). 9 The dis- advantages of the previous methods are high-energy consumption and formation of microstructure defects (i.e. particle agglomeration, porosity, particle-free zones (PFZs), etc.). Therefore, the mechanical charac- teristics of these composites may be decreased. Also, the cost to produce MMCs by these methods is very high, because they need expensive and high-technology equipment and very difficult processing methods. To overcome the previous problems, a severe plastic accumulative roll bonding (ARB) method has been proposed and applied as an effective method to fabri- cate MMCs. 10–13 Severe plastic deformation (SPD) is known as a method of metal forming by imposing large 1 Department of Mechanical Design and Production Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Zagazig University, Egypt 2 Higher Technological Institute, 10th of Ramadan City, Egypt Corresponding author: AF Meselhy, Zagazig University, Zagazig 055, Egypt. Email: afmeselhy@zu.edu.eg Journal of Composite Materials 0(0) 1–11 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0021998319851831 journals.sagepub.com/home/jcm