Development of Improved High Strength Aluminum Powder Metallurgy Products.

The powder approach to alloy development has distinct metallurgical advantages over the conventional cast and wrought approach. Processes employed for powder production can generate solidification rates sufficiently fast to suppress nucleation and growth of intermetallic compounds andor low-melting eutectics. Powder metallurgy PM processing also provides the ability to add large amounts of the commonly used primary hardening constituents without segregation problems and to introduce fine dispersed phases of normally hard-to-alloy constituents in a well distributed fashion. The quenched microstructure of such an alloy is primarily a homogeneous supersaturated solid solution with a very fine dendritic spacing. This allows for the development of improved combinations of mechanical properties along with improved ease of wrought fabrication of the PM product. Author