Investigation on the fatigue behavior of 7075 aluminum alloy at different aging states

Abstract

To study the effect of the aging state on the low-cycle fatigue (LCF) performance of 7075 Al alloy, LCF experiments with different strain amplitudes (& UDelta;& epsilon;/2 = 0.5%- & UDelta;& epsilon;/2 = 0.9%) were conducted for underaged (UA), peakaging (PA) and overaged (OA) states with similar tensile properties in this work. The effect of the aging state on the cyclic stress response behavior and the LCF lives of 7075 Al alloy was revealed by observing the dislocation configuration after LCF. The microcrack orientation on the surface of LCF samples was observed by the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique, and the results showed that the soft orientation inside the coarse grains was the main cause of fatigue cracking. Combined with the previous studies, we summarized the dominant factors for the LCF and high-cycle fatigue (HCF) properties of 7075 Al alloys at different aging states, i.e., the LCF properties were determined by tensile properties, while the HCF properties were dominated by dislocation slip mode.