The Work Hardening of some Commercial Al Alloys

The work hardening of Al alloys is very important in regards to their formability and their deformation behavior in service. The majority of the work in the literature has considered relatively pure materials, and has tended to concentrate on room temperature and elevated temperature behavior. In Al alloys there is interest in work hardening at lower temperatures since they are quite restricted in terms of the elevated temperatures at which they can be used. In this paper the work hardening of commercial 1000, 3000 and 5000 alloys have been investigated from room temperature down to 85°K. The work hardening has been analyzed using the Voce approach, and it is shown that this enables the work hardening of the different alloys to be related to their basic physical metallurgy.