Influence of Pulsed Current on the Tensile Behaviors of the 5XXX Aluminum Alloy

摘要

Aluminum (Al) alloys have great potential as ideal structural materials because of their high specific strength and stiffness. However, Al alloys exhibit poor ductility at room temperature. Enhancing the formability is a very important and challenging problem to both automotive and manufacturing engineers. In this study, the electro-plastic effects, which is first discovered in 1960s, of 5xxx Al alloy sheets are investigated to improve the formability. To begin with, a test system is built up to carry out the tensile test with heavy electric current flowing through the specimen. The evolutions of the flow stress and the electric resistivity are obtained using this test system. The significant decrease in the flow stress caused by the heavy flowing through current is observed.