THERMO-MECHANICAL CONDITIONS IN HEAT TREATED ALUMINIUM CAST PARTS

摘要

The automobile industry is using an increasing amount of aluminium components in order to reduce weight by replacing steel components. The design and manufacturing of these components are important for the life time and reliability of the final parts. It is common practise to do load analyses in order to evaluate component life time and to do design optimization. However, in order to improve these structural analyses it is important to include the full load history of the material including the influence of the casting process and the subsequent solution treatment phase, quenching and artificial aging. These manufacturing stages can have high influence on deformation and development of residual stresses which are important as initial conditions for subsequent calculations.rnThe work presented in this paper is the outcome of building a 3D numerical tool that is able to model the development of deformations and stresses from the full thermal history starting from mould filling through solidification to cooling and subsequent reheating for solution treatment, quenching and artificial aging. However, in this small paper focus has been put on the modelling of the solution treatment only. The mechanical material model is described by a unified creep model to include rate effects and inelastic behaviour. An industrial component is used as an example to present the influence of creep at high temperature and calculated results are compared to measurements.