Study of structure of naturally aged aluminium after twist channel angular pressing

Highlights: • Investigation of sub-structure development after twist channel angular pressing and ageing • Natural ageing increased electric conductivity and mechanical properties. • Ultra-fine grains with high angle boundaries were formed. • Natural ageing led to reduction of residual stress. -- Abstract: Twist channel angular pressing (TCAP), the severe plastic deformation (SPD) technology developed recently to increase the efficiency of the imposed strain and its homogeneity within a single pass, is an effective process combining channel bending and twist extrusion in a single die. The presented study analyses the phenomena of substructure development, precipitation, structural units' orientations, and the occurrence of residual stress, as well as electric resistivity and microhardness, in commercial purity aluminium naturally aged for two years at room temperature after processing via single pass TCAP. The results are compared with the findings for the TCAP sample right after processing; selected results are also compared with the results for the sample after TCAP and one year of natural ageing, and with a sample processed by conventional ECAP. The analyses showed the substructure to recover substantially, the grain size decreased to submicron size. The residual stress within the grains introduced by the energy accumulated via the severe imposed strain relaxed significantly by the structure restoration, as well as by intensive precipitation. The aged TCAP sample specific electric resistivity was comparable to the resistivity of the original commercially pure aluminium (2.652E-05 and 2.635E-05 Ω·mm²·m⁻¹, respectively), however, the microhardness mapping showed increased mechanical properties with homogeneous distribution.