Abstract:The wear behavior of AZ91 alloy was investigated by considering different parameters, such as load (10-50 N), sliding speed (160-220 mm/s) and sliding distance (250-1000 m). It was found that wear volume loss increased as load increased for all sliding distances and some sliding speeds. For sliding speed of 220 mm/s and sliding distance of 1000 m, the wear volume losses under loads of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 N were calculated to be 15.0, 19.0, 24.3, 33.9 and 37.4 mm³, respectively. Worn surfaces show that abrasion and oxidation were present at a load of 10 N, which changes into delamination at a load of 50 N. ANOVA results show that the contributions of load, sliding distance and sliding speed were 12.99%, 83.04% and 3.97%, respectively. The artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector regressor (SVR) and random forest (RF) methods were applied for the prediction of wear volume loss of AZ91 alloy. The correlation coefficient (R²) values of SVR, RF and ANN for the test were 0.9245, 0.9800 and 0.9845, respectively. Thus, the ANN model has promising results for the prediction of wear performance of AZ91 alloy.

Key words: AZ91 alloy; wear performance; artificial neural networks; support vector regressor; random forest method