IMPROVEMENT ON THE STRENGTH OF 6063 ALUMINUM ALLOY BY MEANS OF SOLUTION HEAT TREAMENT

摘要

The paper examines the solution heat treatment of an extruded 6063 aluminum alloy. The study shows that the strength and fracture resistance of this metal alloy can be influenced to an appreciable extent by the solution heat treatment used in this investigation. The ultimate tensile strength (UTS) increases as the solution time increases from 6 to 20 hours for treatment temperature of 90 deg C. The maximum UTS (198.8MPa and 188.6 MPa) occur at 120 deg C and 150 deg C respectively at the solution holding time of 10hours. While, at 120 deg C and 10hrs, the UTS are relatively the same as the as-received specimen, though the latter exhibits a higher fracture stress. Annealing at 470 deg C results to lower UTS value (114.3MPa) and poor fracture resistance (522MPa). The results of the experiment are found to be in near perfect agreement with Voce Empirical Model. These observations have shown that solution treatment at 150 deg C for 10 hrs can produce significant plastic flow before fracture of 6063 aluminum alloys. Irrespective of the treatment process adopted, the stress- strain behavior is essentially the same for strains within the range 0 <= epsilon <= 0.005.