To provide an understanding of how compositional variations affect the characteristics of coarse intermetallic particles in 7xxx alloys, three Al-Zn-Mg-Cu-Zr aluminium alloy plates with different Zn, Mg and Cu contents were studied by optical microscopy based image analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy disperse X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)....