Architectural design of advanced aluminum matrix composites: a review of recent developments

Nowadays, advanced aluminum matrix composites (AAMCs) are known as the dominant emerging materials employable in different industrial sectors. The reason behind the use of AAMCs originates from the urgent need for weight reduction as well as high efficiency in the automotive, agriculture, aerospace, mining, and electronic applications. This paper deeply reviewed several recent progresses of AMMCs in architecture designs and advanced manufacturing technologies to break through the limitations and promote the overall performance of the AMMCs. The discussion offers a deep understanding of specific issues mainly related to the well-known strength-ductility conflict. As a matter of fact, the dependency of the properties of materials on the microstructure (size dependent) and their components (e.g. high-performance nano reinforcements) could simultaneously provide high efficiency and a series of size-dependent effects. Designing tailored architectures (e.g. harmonic structure, hierarchical structure, multimodal distributions, layered architectures, network structure, gradient structures, heterogeneous laminated structures), known as most promising, provides new routes for attaining high-efficiency and mechanical properties optimization. It is worth noting that special distribution concept in architecture design is to be used carefully, as a homogenous distribution suggests all the reinforcements are distributed in the undifferentiated locations while inhomogeneous distribution stands for the selective distributed locations following certain regularities. These novel architecture designs could be achieved through applying the advanced manufacturing technologies (e.g. severe plastic deformation, additive manufacturing, and powder metallurgy-based technologies) with the potential to be used on a large scale by employing innovative techniques for the preparation, processing, and producing of AAMCs. This paper aims to correlate the most important factor namely size dependency (in the opinion of the authors) to mechanical properties in architectural designs in AMMCs, and should serve as a guide for research on AMMCs, to design target performance levels for applications to numerous and different industrial applications.