Soutenance de thèse : Justine TAURINES

Composition-dependent precipitation in Mg/Si graded 6xxx aluminium alloys: from powder metallurgy to hardening kinetics simulation

Doctorante : Justine TAURINES

Laboratoire INSA : MATEIS
Ecole doctorale : ED34 : Matériaux de Lyon

Recycling Al alloys often leads to uncontrolled ranges of alloying elements compositions. Alloy design based on recycling must therefore account for these composition variations on the alloy properties. High-throughput approaches, such as graded material studies are well adapted to tackle this problem. 6XXX series is a good case study since the contributions of Mg and Si on the metastability cascades are not perfectly understood.

In this PhD, graded materials, with a variation in both Mg and Si contents, are manufactured by powder metallurgy. Mg-rich powder is first poured on Si-rich powder. Then these two powder beds are consolidated by Spark Plasma Sintering and then subjected to a solutionizing treatment during which Mg and Si gradients form and widen. Microstructure and hardness are first characterised along the gradient. Then, an ageing treatment at 170°C is performed to get a whole range of precipitation sequences. The effect of composition on precipitation kinetics (precipitation pathways, precipitation state, hardness) are characterised using TEM, DSC and SAXS. A mean field framework based  on classical nucleation and growth theories coupled with a hardening model has been developed and successfully compared to the experiments.