Applicability of Solid Solution Heat Treatments to Aluminum Foams

Present research work evaluates the influence of both density and size on the treatability of Aluminum-based (6000 series) foam-parts subjected to a typical solid solution heat treatment (water quenching). The results are compared with those obtained for the bulk alloy, evaluating the fulfilment of cooling requirements. Density of the foams was modeled by tomography analysis and the thermal properties calculated, based on validated density-scaled models. With this basis, cooling velocity maps during water quenching were predicted by finite element modeling (FEM) in which boundary conditions were obtained by solving the inverse heat conduction problem. Simulations under such conditions have been validated experimentally. Obtained results address incomplete matrix hardening for foam-parts bigger than 70 mm in diameter with a density below 650 kg/m. An excellent agreement has been found in between the predicted cooling maps and final measured microhardness profiles.