Nowadays, Aluminium (Al) based hybrid surface composites are amongst the fastest developing advanced materials used for structural applications. Friction Stir Processing (FSP) has emerged as a clean and flexible solid-state surface composites fabrication technique. Intensive research in this field resulted in numerous research output; which hinders in finding relevant meta-data for further research with objectivity. In order to facilitate this research need, present article summarizes current state of the art and advances in aluminium based hybrid surface composites fabrication by FSP with in-situ and ex-situ approach. Reported literature were read and systematically categorized to show impacts of different types of reinforcements, deposition techniques, hybrid reinforcement ratio and FSP machine parameters on microstructures, mechanical and tribological characteristics of different Al alloys. Challenges and opportunities in this field have been summarized at the end, which will be beneficial to researchers working on solid state FSP technique.

Feasibility of a model of gas bubble break-up and coalescence in an air-lift column enabling determination of bubble size distributions in a mixer with a self-aspirating impeller has been attempted in this paper. According to velocity measurements made by the PIV method with a self-aspirating impeller and Smagorinski’s model, the spatial distribution of turbulent energy dissipation rate close to the impeller was determined. This allowed to positively verify the dependence of gas bubble velocity used in the model, in relation to turbulent energy dissipation rate. Furthermore, the range of the eddy sizes capable of breaking up the gas bubbles was determined. The verified model was found to be greatly useful, but because of the simplifying assumptions some discrepancies of experimental and model results were observed.