A study on the combined effect of aging and severe plastic deformation on the mechanical properties of AA6061 alloy

Abstract

Abstract Severe plastic deformation (SPD) process is used to attain ultra fine grains in the material. Twist channel angular pressing (TCAP) is an effective SPD technique that is used to achieve more grain refinement in less number of passes. This work explores the combined effect of aging and TCAP on the mechanical properties of aluminium-6061 alloy. Finite element analysis (FEA) was performed to predict the load for two coefficients of friction (µ=0.2&0.5). Based on the strain to load ratio, µ=0.2 was used to perform the experiments. The samples were aged at 150°C for 9 hours and extruded by twist channel angular pressing process. The hardness and tensile strength of the aged and un-aged samples before and after twist channel angular pressing was measured. Hardness and the tensile strength was measured. Compared to the un-aged sample the tensile strength and hardness is increased by 34% and 23% respectively for the aged specimen after the twist channel angular pressing process.