ABSTRACT
With the continuous development in manufacturing technology over the years, there has been a need for improvement in the manufacturing sector to meet the current demand to produce highly effective components with maximum accuracy. Magnesium (Mg) alloys have a wide range of applications in the field of engineering. Due to its hexagonal lattice structure, it affects the fundamental properties of alloys. Mg alloy has various applications in automobile, electronics, aerospace, and biomedical sectors for its various advantages, like high stiffness, high specific strength, good vibration absorption, good machinability, etc. Friction stir additive manufacturing (FSAM) is an advanced process and related to the friction stir processing. FSAM is a technique to add some external metal to the base metal to get the enhanced properties of a metal due to intense and localized plastic deformation. The deformation takes place by forcibly injecting a non-consumable tool into the workpiece and rotating the tool in a stirring motion as it is inserted to the workpiece. For this purpose, the present work looks at improvement in the material properties, like tensile strength, micro-hardness, bending angle, and ductility, including microstructure. During the FSAM process, variables like rotational speed, traverse speed, % of Al and the number of passes were studied. With the help of TAGUCHI L16 parametric design, experiments were carried out. The ANOVA analysis was performed to calculate the optimum levels of process parameters, depending on the output values. With the help of the Taguchi Grey relational analysis, the process parameters are optimized.
