SEM Images of Aluminum (IMAGE)
Caption
Designing lightweight materials -- a goal in the automotive and airline industries -- requires carefully joining together different types of materials like metals and polymers, and these additional steps drive up manufacturing costs. New work in laser technology recently increased the adhesion strength of metal-plastic hybrid materials; engineers demonstrated a technique for binding plastic to aluminum by pretreating sheets of aluminum with infrared lasers. They discuss their work in the Journal of Laser Applications. This image shows SEM images of (a) aluminum swarfes at the edges of the continuous wave laser structure and (b) remaining aluminum in the trenches of the molded polymer surface after tensile shear test.
Credit
Matthieu Fischer
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