Effect of aging on mechanical properties of 6063 Al-alloy using instrumented ball indentation technique

One of the most important issues of standard conventional test methods for determining mechanical properties of ductile materials is that the requirement of test materials should be adequate and it cannot be applied to in-service components. Therefore, in this study, an instrumented ball indentation technique has been applied to determine a few mechanical properties of a 6063 Al alloy in order to establish a correlation between microstructure and its mechanical properties. The as-received 6063 alloy sample was in cast and homogenized condition. It was solutionized at 520 deg. C with two aging treatments. It was found that solutionized material with subsequent aging at 220 deg. C for 3 h does not produce any noticeable variation in mechanical properties. Whereas, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) on solutionized samples after 7 h aging at 220 deg. C of the same material revealed precipitation of sub-micron size (of the order of 60 nm) Mg2Si phase and this subsequently resulted in variation in the mechanical properties of the alloy.