Microcosmic mechanism of performance enhancement of wire arc additive manufactured Al-Zn-Mg-Cu alloy based on heat treatment

Abstract

Al-Zn-Mg-Cu alloys are widely used in aerospace structures because of their excellent performances. To improve the poor mechanical performance of the Al-Zn-Mg-Cu arc additive manufactured deposit, heat treatments were used for the enhancement of mechanical performances. The microstructure of the deposits was improved after heat treatment due to the decomposition of intermetallic compounds. Meanwhile, the solid solution of alloying elements and the phase transformation led to two strengthening mechanisms: solid solution strengthening and the precipitation strengthening. The performance enhancement of the deposits was most significant under the T6 heat treatment. The horizontal and vertical strength increased to 513 and 504 MPa, respectively, and the hardness increased to 205 HV with more uniformly distribution in the vertical direction.

Recent progress in process, structure, properties, and performance in additive manufacturing

“…The special issue contains contributions on the major variants of AM including laser DED [6,9,18,24], gas metal arc DED [7,[10][11][12][13][14]16,19,[21][22][23], laser PBF [8], cold spray [17], laser-arc hybrid manufacturing [20], and fused deposition modelling [15]. Chaurasia et al [22] presented a novel approach to real-time monitoring of melt pool cross-sectional asymmetry during laser PBF using a two-color thermal camera.…”

“…Yuan et al [10] improved the mechanical properties of Al-Zn-Mg-Cu alloy parts made by gas metal arc DED by using post-process heat treatment. Heat treatment decomposed the intermetallic compounds and the improvements in properties occurred due to the solid solution strengthening and precipitation hardening.…”

“…The articles in the special issue cover a wide variety of alloys including Ti alloy [6][7][8][9], steels [11,13,14,18], Ni alloys [9,16,19], and Al alloys [10,12,23]. In addition, several new materials are discussed that were specially designed for AM.…”

“…This special issue includes all aforementioned trends of progress through 19 original research articles [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. The editors of STWJ invited active researchers from the AM and welding communities to contribute to this special issue.…”