The enhanced theta-prime (θ′) precipitation in an Al-Cu alloy with trace Au additions

Y Chen; Z Zhang; A Tsalanidis; M Weyland; NV Medhekar; L Bourgeois

Journal article

The enhanced theta-prime (θ′) precipitation in an Al-Cu alloy with trace Au additions

Y Chen, Z Zhang, A Tsalanidis, M Weyland, NV Medhekar, L Bourgeois

Acta Materialia | PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD | Published : 2017

DOI: 10.1016/j.actamat.2016.12.012

Abstract

Linking the atomic level kinetic precipitation pathways induced by elemental additions to the resulting microstructure is fundamentally desirable for the design of new classes of light alloys. Aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (AC-STEM) and first principles calculations were used to investigate the influence of trace Au (200 ppm) additions on precipitation in an Al-Cu-Au alloy. These Au additions resulted in a significant enhancement of the low-temperature age hardening, which was demonstrated to be associated with accelerated precipitate nucleation and growth. Atomic-resolution annular dark field (ADF) imaging showed the clearly reduced critical length and thick..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Les J. Allen Author

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Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Funding Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council (LE0454166) the Victorian State Government and Monash University for instrumentation, the computational support from Monash Sun Grid cluster, the National Computing Infrastructure and Pawsey Supercomputing Centre funded by the Australian Government, and use of the facilities within the Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy. YC would like to thank Mr Yong Zhang for discussion of the nucleation mechanism, and Dr. Ye Zhu for useful discussions regarding the measurement of lattice strain by GPA analysis. JL acknowledges the financial support from the Major International (Regional) Joint Research Project (No. 51420105005) from China. This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Projects DP150100558 and DP140102538).