Effect of Pre-Deformation on Mechanical Response of an Artificially Aged Al-Mg-Si Alloy

In order to investigate the effect of deformation on the artificial aging response of an Al-Mg-Si alloy, a series of tensile tests have been designed and carried out on the aluminium alloy AA6060. Extruded and solution heat treated specimens were pre-deformed 0%, 2%, 5%, and 10% (engineering strain) and subsequently artificially aged at three different aging temperatures (150, 175 and 190 degrees C) for three different times (10, 100 and 300 min). It was observed that the amount of pre-deformation is determining for the final mechanical properties of the short-time artificially aged AA6060 compared to the material aged for longer times when the mechanical properties level out regardless of the introduced pre-deformation. In addition to the hardness measurements and tensile tests, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) have been used to characterize dislocation evolution, microstructure and precipitation state for various combinations of pre-deformation and aging time. [doi:10.2320/matertrans.L-MZ201127]