Carbon Fiber Breakage Mechanism in Aluminum (Al)/Carbon Fibers (CFs) Composite Sheet during Accumulative Roll Bonding (ARB) Process

We put forward a method of fabricating Aluminum (Al)/carbon fibers (CFs) composite sheets by the accumulative roll bonding (ARB) method. The finished Al/CFs composite sheet has CFs and pure Al sheets as sandwich and surface layers. After cross-section observation of the Al/CFs composite sheet, we found that the CFs discretely distributed within the sandwich layer. Besides, the tensile test showed that the contribution of the sandwich CFs layer to tensile strength was less than 11% compared with annealed pure Al sheet. With ex-situ observation of the CFs breakage evolution with −16%, −32%, and −45% rolling reduction during the ARB process, the plastic instability of the Al layer was found to bring shear damages to the CFs. At last, the bridging strengthening mechanism introduced by CFs was sacrificed. We provide new insight into and instruction on Al/CFs composite sheet preparation method and processing parameters.