Abstract
A series of thermal-mechanical tests have been designed and carried out on the aluminium alloy AA 6082 to investigate the effects of solution heat treatment (SHT) time on the mechanical properties for a range of deformation rates at the SHT temperature of 525 °C. Particularly the effects of SHT time on the flow stress, ductility and anisotropy of the material are investigated experimentally. Based on Pearl’s growth rate equation and diffusion theory, a SHT completeness variable is introduced to model the microstructural evolution of the material during the SHT period. This SHT evolution variable is incorporated into a viscoplastic material model to simulate the material flow at different levels of SHT completeness. A new set of unified SHT viscoplastic constitutive equations is formulated and the constants within the equation set are determined from the experimental data of AA 6082, using an Evolutionary Programming (EP) based optimisation software package. Further experimental work has been carried out for different deformation and SHT conditions to validate the model predictions.
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