Machining Characteristics of Multiwall-CNT Reinforced Al/Al-Si Composites using Recurrence Quantification Analysis

Aluminium (Al)/Aluminium alloy composites are emerging as very promising materials, especially in the fields of aerospace and automotive for their various attractive and technically demanding properties. Discontinuously reinforced aluminium metal matrix composites with reinforcements as nanoparticles of ceramics in general and carbon nanotubes in particular have emerged as the forerunner for a variety of general and special engineering and structural applications. In many of the fields where these materials find applications, machining is invariably required for getting correct geometries, dimensions and surface finish of the components. Hence, establishing the machining characteristics of these materials in terms of the deterministic nature of dynamic signals such as cutting force signals and vibration signals is very important and sought after. Machining process has been understood to be nonlinear and chaotic in nature. In this paper a relatively new technique called Recurrence Plots (RP) and Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), a tool to analyse nonlinear and chaotic systems, is used to study the machining characteristics of cast and powder metallurgy Al and Al-Si alloys (LM6 and LM25), CNT reinforced Al/Al-Si composites produced by powder metallurgy route. Cutting force signals were sensed, acquired and analysed using RQA technique. Determinism (DET), which is one of the variables of RQA, indicates the determinism present in a signal. The values of DET were used to compare the machining characteristics. For all the three materials the deterministic nature of the cutting force signal was highest when reinforced with 0.5 weight percentage CNT, followed by respective base alloys produced by powder metallurgy method and casting route.