Contribution of a solute atoms in the relaxation phenomenon at high temperature in Cu–Al single crystal alloys

Two Cu–Al single crystals with 7 and 14 at. % Al respectively have been studied using isothermal mechanical spectroscopy (IMS) technique. After a 1% cold work by torsion, the samples have been progressively heated to 1140 K and then cooled until room temperature. IMS experiments allow to compare the isothermal internal friction spectra obtained during the heating (in this case, the annealing temperature is equal to the temperature of measurement) with the measurements performed at various temperature during the cooling after the annealing at 1140 K.Three relaxation peaks were observed. The first one at about 0.4 TM (TM: melting point) is a Zener relaxation peak (PZ) due to the reorientation under constraint of pairs of aluminium atoms. The high temperature annealing does not influence PZ.At about 0.6TM, a peak (P1) related to a dislocation mechanism is evidenced. The relaxation strength of P1 peak decreases with the temperature and a new relaxation peak (P2) is progressively developed. The IMS spectra obtained during the cooling evidenced only P2.The relaxation parameters obtained by the Arrhenius plots and the evolution with the annealing temperature allow to assign P1 and P2 to an interaction between the dislocations and the solute atoms according to the Darinskiy model.