The strengthening effect of inter-layer cold working and post-deposition heat treatment on the additively manufactured Al–6.3Cu alloy

By Jianglong Gu, Jialuo Ding, Stewart W. Williams, Huimin Gu, J. Bai, Y. Zhai, Pei-hua Ma. 2016

361 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Wire + Arc Additive Manufacture (WAAM) attracts great interest from the aerospace industry for producing components with aluminum alloys, particularly Al–Cu alloy of the 2000 series such as 2219 alloy. However the application is restricted by the low strength properties of the as-deposited WAAM metal. In this study two strengthening methods were investigated – inter-layer cold working and post-deposition heat treatment. Straight wall samples were prepared with 2319 aluminum alloy wire. Inter-layer rolling with loads of 15 kN, 30 kN and 45 kN were employed during deposition. The ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and yield strength (YS) of the inter-layer rolled alloy with 45 kN load can achieve 314 MPa and 244 MPa respectively. The influence of post-deposition T6 heat treatment was investigated on the WAAM alloy with or without rolling. Compared with inter-layer rolling, post-deposition heat treatment can provide much greater enhancement of the strength. After T6 treatment, the UTS and YS of both of the as-deposited and 45 kN rolled alloys exceeded 450 MPa and 305 MPa respectively, which are higher than the properties of the wrought 2219−T6 alloy. The strengthening mechanisms of this additively manufactured Al–6.3Cu alloy were investigated through microstructure analysis.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de011b643b7f9919b78aea431b235d2d9f7db10b

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Citations in the corpus

Metal additive manufacturing in the commercial aviation industry: A review (2019, background): “Cold work via rolling can be applied to the part directly after material deposition in order to improve the microstructure and reduce porosity [103, 148].”
Microstructure and mechanical properties of wire + arc additively manufactured 2024 aluminum alloy components: As-deposited and post heat-treated (2019, background): “[9, 10] studied the microstructure and mechanical properties the WAAM 2219 aluminum alloys with CMT process, and further pointed out inter-layer cold working can improve the properties and eliminate pores in the deposits.”
A comparative study of additively manufactured thin wall and block structure with Al-6.3% Cu alloy using cold metal transfer process (2017, methodology): “3%Cu alloy was also studied with the cold metal transfer (CMT) process [13], with a focus of the effect of inter-layer cold working and post-deposition heat treatment on the material strengthening of this alloy [8] and their effect on porosity control [14].”
Current Status and Perspectives on Wire and Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) (2019, methodology): “For Al-based alloys, rolling [23] and the welding mode CMT-pulse advanced [149] were seen to entirely remove pores.”
Design for Additive Manufacturing (2019, background): “aluminium alloys during Wire + Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) reduces porosity [136] and increases strength due to finer sub-grains and fewer mis-orientations [137].”
Control of residual stress and distortion in aluminium wire + arc additive manufacture with rolling (2018, methodology): “Figure 9: (a) Correlation between hardness and increased lattice parameter versus applied inter-pass rolling load; SEM images showing the morphology of Al2Cu θ phase in the (b) as-deposited wall and (c) the inter-pass rolled wall (c) [38]”