This article focuses on exploring how the electrical conductivity and densification properties of metallic samples made from aluminum (Al) powders reinforced with 0.5 wt % concentration of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and consolidated through spark plasma sintering (SPS) process are affected by the carbon nanotubes dispersion and the Al particles morphology. Experimental characterization tests performed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and by energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) show that the MWCNTs were uniformly ball-milled and dispersed in the Al surface particles, and undesirable phases were not observed in X-ray diffraction measurements. Furthermore, high densification parts and an improvement of about 40% in the electrical conductivity values were confirmed via experimental tests performed on the produced sintered samples. These results elucidate that modifying the powder morphology using the ball-milling technique to bond carbon nanotubes into the Al surface particles aids the ability to obtain highly dense parts with increasing electrical conductivity properties.
Keywords: aluminum matrix nanocomposites; electrical conductivity; multi-walled CNTs; spark plasma sintering.