Influence study of manufacturing constraints and percentage of reinforcement on copper - fly ash composite by full factorial design

Copper-based composites play a vital role in the structural, automobile and aerospace applications. In the present study composites with varying fly ash reinforcement of 0%, 2.5%, 5%, 7.5% and 10% are prepared by powder metallurgy route. The influence of manufacturing constraints such as sintering temperature, compaction pressure and sintering time along with the reinforcement percentage on copper matrix composite is studied using full factorial design. Fly ash is used as the reinforcement. The output parameters studied are relative density, hardness and compressive strength. Contributions of each input parameters on output responses are found out. The results show that compaction pressure contributes more for the relative density with the highest contribution of 60.21%, while for the hardness and compression strength, the influence of percentage reinforcement made the highest contribution with 85.5% and 51.94%.