Influence of Solid Solutions on the Al2024 High-Temperature Deformation Behavior

The mechanical properties of 2024 aluminum alloy were studied after two different tempers. The T351 temper (solution heat treatment, stress relief, and natural aging) leads to high hardness and toughness. A thermal treatment consisting of heat-treating at 280 °C for 48 h and slow cooling in a furnace, named TT temper, was performed to increase the precipitate size and their separation while minimizing the amount of solutes in solid solution, which produced the minimum hardness for an overaged Al2024 alloy and a lower tensile flow stress than for the T351 temper. The flow stress strongly decreases and the elongation to failure strongly increases for both materials above 300 °C. Differences in strain rate at a given stress in the power law regime at all temperatures for both tempers and compared with pure aluminum are attributed to the influence of solutes in solid solutions, affecting both the glide and climb of dislocations. However, the stacking fault energy, SFE, alone does not account for the hot deformation behavior. Thus, it is the synergistic effect of various solutes that affects the entire deformation process, causing a decrease of three or four orders of magnitude in strain rate for a given stress with respect to the pure aluminum matrix values.