Investigation of the Effect of Heat Treatment Time in Case of Recrystallization of Al99.5

Abstract

In this study the effect of heat treatment time was investigated in case of recrystallization of Al99.5 material samples. Two different type were manufactured based on the previously applied cold forming. 12% and 24% cold forming was applied to the samples before the heat treatment procedure, which was always at 570 °C and cooled in water. Six different heat treatment time were investigated, namely 5, 10, 30, 60, 120 and 240 minutes. After the recrystallization procedure the microstructure and the mechanical properties were determined. It was found that in the case of the 12% cold formed samples after 30-minute-long heat treatment there were still signs of the original microstructure, however it does not affect the mechanical properties. The yield strength and the ultimate tensile strength were independent of the heat treatment time; they were only dependent on the grain size which was expected. A strong dependency can be discovered between the elongation at break and the heat treatment time. A tangent hyperbolic function was fitted on the measured data, which showed that the asymptote was ~29% for both type of samples. This is a 25% increase compared to the 5-minute-long heat treatment time samples, and this value was reached after ~120 minutes. Another result was that the elongation at break dependency on the grain size is decreasing with increasing heat treatment time.