The creep Kinetics of sand cat zinc-based alloys no. 2, ACuZinc5, and ACuzinc10

Compressive creep tests have been carried out on three sand cast zinc-rich alloys No. 2 (Zn-4% Al-2.8% Cu 0.03% Mg), ACuZinc5 (Zn-3% Al-5.2% Cu-0.04% Mg) and ACuZinc10 (Zn-3.5% Al-9.3% Cu-0.03% Mg) in the stress range 20 to 100 MPa, and at temperatures from 70 to 160 deg. centigrade. The tests were performed on a standard weight lever arm compressive creep machine. Alloy No. 2 is a conventional zinc alloy, whereas ACuZinc5 and ACuZinc10 belong to a family of new, GM-patented, high performance ternary zin-copper-aluminium alloys which are suitable for manufacturing net shape die castings. Along with creep, other properties of ACuZinc alloys are claimed to be better than conventional zinc alloys No. 3 and No. 5 and ZA alloys, i.e. ZA.8, ZA.12 and ZA.27. A parametric relationship was obeyed, of the form:In t=C-n(In sigma)+Q/RTm where C is a constant, sigma the applied stress, t time of test, n the stress exponent, Q the activation energy, R the gas constant, and T is the absolute temperature. The primary creep contraction was generally found to increase with increasing copper content, but in a non-linear fashion. The secondary creep rates of alloy No. 2 were slightly lower than those of ACuZinc5 and ACuZinc10. Based on the above equation, continuous design stresses were calculated under different testing conditions which showed that both ACuZinc alloys were inferior in creep strength to alloy No.2 due to its lower secondary creep rates. The results and microstructure of alloys also showed that in all three alloys, the creep-controlling mechanism is the dislocation climb over second-phase (Epsilon) particles. (author)