PIP, A New Technology to Increase Aluminum Alloy Strength and Wear Resistance

"Starting with an aluminum alloy, it is proposed to form a new type of lightweight composite material that would integrally incorporate a metal-ceramic composite zone to strengthen and/or increase wear resistance. The amount of ceramic material in thecomposite zone and the thickness of the zone would be empirically optimized to strengthen the material or to increase the wear resistance. This process will increase the strength-to-mass ratio of the material, thereby enabling the overall weight of thecomponent to be decreased. Some of the additional advantages of this process are: (1) we can process materials that can not readily be processed by other methods because we process the final material - there has been limited use of aluminum-lithium alloysfor DRA applications because of the severe oxidation problems of handling the aluminum-lithium powders and casting problems; we would process the final item, 2) for wear applications, we only process the areas that wear, e.g., the wear surface of a geartooth, and (3) it is very economical - it has been estimated that this process is three- to twenty-times cheaper than potential competing processes when the cost of the initial facility, the cost of materials and the cost of labor are considered. Successof this project will result in a new, low-cost technology to produce an advanced aluminum product with a high strength-to-mass ratio, thereby enabling a decrease in the overall weight and an in