Recovery of Industrial and Recycled Al–Cu Alloys Subjected to Severe Plastic Deformation

Equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) is a well-known method to obtain high hardness levels through a strong refinement of grains. To obtain fine grains, a subsequent heating is performed after deformation. The main difficulty is to retain a sufficiently small grain size. Alloy purity is an important parameter in recristallization kinetics. In the present work, an industrial and a recycled Al-4%Cu alloys were subjected to ECAP. The evolution of the microstructure of the deformed and annealed alloys was investigated. The alloys exhibit different hardness values for a given equivalent deformation. In industrial alloy, no recovery was observed at low temperatures. On the other hand, enhanced precipitation in this alloy leads to an increase in hardness balancing then softening due to recovery. A substantial decrease in hardness is observed around 250 ∘C and seems to depend on alloy purity.