Critical Quenching Rates After Solution Annealing: Peculiarities of Aluminum–Silicon Alloys Fabricated by Laser Powder-Bed Fusion

Hot isostatic pressing is commonly used to reduce the porosity of (sand-)cast age-hardenable Al-alloys in order to meet the high quality requirements defined by aircraft and automotive industries. In order to establish additive manufacturing methods, such as laser powder-bed fusion (L-PBF), hot isostatic pressing can be utilized to reduce the anisotropic mechanical properties in as-built condition and at the same time eliminate porosity. For the cast aluminum alloy A356, a gas pressure of 75 MPa during hot isostatic pressing lowers the critical cooling rate required to achieve an oversaturated solid solution to about 1 K/s, which is significantly lower than the required quenchingrate at atmospheric pressure (2–4 K/s). Thus, an oversaturated state of dissolved magnesium and silicon atoms within the aluminum matrix of cast alloys can easily be achieved in modern hot isostatic presses, thereby avoiding the necessity of a separate solution annealing step. In this work, we applied hot isostatic pressing followed by rapid quenching and direct aging to age-hardenable aluminum alloys processed by both sand casting and laser powder-bed fusion. It was shown that the proposed process of direct aging could be utilized for post-heat treatment of additively manufactured age-hardenable aluminum alloys to open up new fields of applications, for which components have to possess a high fatigue resistance.