The demand for lightweight materials in the automobile and aerospace industries has led to various researches on graphite and graphite‐aluminum composites. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the addition of micron/nano TiB2 particles on the properties of graphite‐aluminum composite particularly the wear resistance. The powders were sintered at 550 °C and 50 MPa with more attention on the effect of the sintering temperature on densification, microhardness, coefficient of thermal expansion, wear and frictional force. The results show that the addition of nano TiB2 reduces the densification while improving the hardness of Gr−Al composite with the lowest value being 96.0 % of relative density and the highest microhardness of 43.58 HV 0.1. The coefficient of thermal expansion and frictional force of the composite materials increases with increasing TiB2 content and heating rate (100 °C/min–150 °C/min). TiB2 particles enhance the wear resistance of graphite‐aluminum composite. The addition of micro/nanoparticles of TiB2 to graphite‐aluminum composite increases its corrosion rate with improved passivation behavior in 3.5 wt.% NaCl solution. Nevertheless, 5 wt.% nano (100 °C/min) TiB2 additions do not affect the overall corrosion rate. This work has shown that we can take advantage of some of the properties of TiB2 to improve the performance of graphite‐aluminum composite.

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In this work, porous titanium (Ti) foams were successfully produced using spark plasma sintering technique at four different temperatures (up to 650 °C), in conjunction with vacuum sintering (used as a post-treatment) at a constant temperature of 1200 °C. To obtain a porous structure, 60 vol% of sodium chloride was included as a pore spacer, with the addition of polyethylene glycol solution for Ti-NaCl interparticle binding. The work aimed at studying the effect of sintering temperature on the final pore features and compression resistance of the porous titanium foams. X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy as characterization techniques were used to analyze phases and pore evolutions, respectively. The results showed that the pore characteristics and the final porosity of porous titanium foams profoundly depend on the sintering temperature. The lowest porosity of approximately 53.9 vol%, with denser pore walls, was seen at the highest sintering temperature. Such foams sintered at 650 °C can resist the compression stress as high as 123 MPa while exhibiting the stiffness value of 8.1 GPa. The results indicate that the porous Ti foams produced have great potential for applications in hard tissue engineering.

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