Effect of homogenization and alloying elements on hot deformation behaviour of 1XXX series aluminum alloys

In the present study, the effect of different alloying elements as well as the homogenization treatment on the hot workability and microstructure of dilute Al-Fe-Si alloys was investigated using hot compression tests, optical microscopy, SEM, electron EBSD, TEM, electrical conductivity measurements.;The effect of the homogenization treatment on the microstructure and hot workability of two dilute Al-Fe-Si alloys was first investigated. Homogenization promoted the phase transformation from the metastable AlmFe or alpha-AlFeSi phase to the Al3Fe equilibrium phase and induced a significant change in solute levels in the solid solution. Homogenization at 550°C significantly reduced the solid solution levels due to the elimination of the supersaturation originating from the cast ingot and produced the lowest flow stress under all of the deformation conditions studied.;The hot deformation behavior of dilute Al-Fe-Si alloys containing different amounts of Fe (0.1 to 0.7 wt%) and Si (0.1 to 0.25 wt%) was studied by uniaxial compression tests conducted at various temperatures (350-550 °C) and strain rates (0.01-10 s-1). The flow stress of the 1xxx alloys increased with increasing Fe and Si content. Increasing the Fe content from 0.1 to 0.7% raised the flow stress by 11-32% in Al-Fe-0.1Si alloys, whereas the flow stress increased 5-14% when the Si content increased from 0.1 to 0.25% in Al-0.1Fe-Si alloys. The experimental stress-strain data were employed to drive constitutive equations correlating flow stress, deformation temperature and strain rate considering the influence of the chemical composition. The microstructural analysis results revealed that dynamic recovery is the sole softening mechanism during hot deformation of dilute Al-Fe-Si alloys. Increasing the Fe and Si content retarded dynamic recovery and resulted in a decrease in the subgrain size and mean misorientation angle of the boundaries.;Furthermore, the hot deformation behavior of dilute Al-Fe-Si alloys containing various Mn (0.1 and 0.2 wt%) and Cu (0.05, 0.18 and 0.31 wt%) contents was also investigated. It was found that both manganese and copper in solid solution have a significant influence on the hot workability of dilute Al-Fe-Si alloys. On a wt% basis, Mn exhibits a stronger strengthening effect compared to Cu. The activation energies for deformation were calculated from experimental data for all the alloys investigated. With a 0.2 wt% Mn addition, the activation energy increased from 161 and 176 kJ/mol for low-Fe (0.1wt%) and high-Fe (0.5wt%) base alloys to 181 and 192 kJ/mol, respectively. The addition of Cu up to 0.31 wt% only slightly increased the activation energy of low-Fe base alloy from 161 to 166 kJ/mol. Solute diffusion acted as the deformation rate controlling mechanism in these dilute alloys. Mn containing alloys have higher flow stress and higher activation energy due to the considerably lower diffusion rate of Mn in aluminum compared to Cu containing alloys. An addition of Mn and Cu also retarded the dynamic recovery and resulted in a decrease in the subgrain size and mean misorientation angle of the grain boundaries.;In addition, based on hot compression tests, an artificial neural network model was developed to predict the high temperature flow behavior of Al-0.12Fe-0.1Si-Cu alloys as a function of chemical composition (with Cu contents of 0.002-0.31wt%) and process parameters. A three-layer feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural network with 20 neurons in a hidden layer was established in this study to predict the flow behavior of Al-0.12Fe-0.1Si alloy with various levels of Cu addition (0.002-0.31wt%) at different deformation conditions. The input parameters were Cu content, temperature, strain rate and strain, while the flow stress was the output. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated using various standard statistical parameters. An excellent agreement between experimental and predicted results was obtained. Sensitivity analysis indicated that the strain rate is the most important parameter, while the Cu content exhibited a modest but significant influence on the flow stress. The ANN model proposed in this study can accurately predict the hot deformation behavior of Al-0.12Fe-0.1Si alloys. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).