Numerical Simulation on Thermal Stresses and Solidification Microstructure for Making Fiber-Reinforced Aluminum Matrix Composites

The fabrication of fiber-reinforced metal matrix composites (MMCs) mainly consists of two stages: infiltration and solidification, which have a significant influence on the properties of MMCs. The present study is primarily focused on the simulation of the solidification process and the effect of the active cooling of fibers with and without nickel coating for making the continuous carbon fiber-reinforced aluminum matrix composites. The thermomechanical finite element model was established to investigate the effects of different cooling conditions on the temperature profile and thermal stress distributions based on the simplified physical model. The predicted results of the temperature distribution agree well with the results of the references. Additionally, a three-dimensional cellular automata (CA) finite element (FE) model is used to simulate the microstructure evolution of the solidification process by using ProCAST software. The results show that adding a nickel coating can make the heat flux smaller in the melt, which is favorable for preventing debonding at the coating/fiber and alloy interface and obtaining a finer microstructure. In the presence of the nickel coating, the number of grains increases significantly, and the average grain size decreases, which can improve the properties of the resultant composite materials. Meanwhile, the predicting results also show that the interfaces of fiber–coating, fiber–melt, and coating–melt experience higher temperature gradients and thermal stresses. These results will lead to the phenomenon of stress concentration and interface failure. Thus, it was demonstrated that these simulation methods could be helpful for studying the solidification of fiber-reinforced MMCs and reducing the number of trial-and-error experiments.