Friction stir welding (FSW) is the most widely used solid-state joining technique for light-weight plate and sheet products. This new joining technique is considered an energy-saving, environment friendly, and relatively versatile technology. FSW has been found to be a reliable joining technique in high-demand technology fields, such as high-strength aerospace aluminum and titanium alloys, and for other metallic alloys that are hard to weld by conventional fusion welding. Several studies accounted for the microstructural modifications induced by solid-state FSW, based on the resulting mechanical properties obtained at the FSW joints, such as tensile, bending, torsion, ductility and fatigue responses. In the last few years with the need and emerging urgency to widen the FSW application fields, broadening the possible alloy systems, and to optimize the resulting mechanical properties, this joining technique was further developed. In this respect, the present contribution focuses on two modified-FSW techniques and approaches applied to aluminum alloys plates. In a first case, an age-hardening AA6082 sheets were double side friction stir welded (DS-FSW). In a second case a non-age-hardening AA5754 sheet was FSW by an innovative approach in which welding pin was forced to slightly deviate away from the joining centreline (defined by authors as RT). In both the cases different pin heights were used, the sheets were subjected to heat treatments (peak hardening T6 for the AA6082, and annealing for the AA5754) and compared to the non-heat treated FSW conditions. Microstructural modifications were characterized by optical microscopy (OM). The mechanical properties were characterized both locally, by nanoindentation techniques, and globally, by tensile (yield, YT; ultimate, UT; and elongation, El) or forming limit curve (FLC) tests. Both the new approaches were directly compared to the conventional FSW techniques in terms of resulting microstructures and mechanical responses.

In this work, the corrosion behavior of an AA6012 aluminum alloy, submitted to a T6 strengthening treatment (solubilization and aging), and later to a severe plastic deformation, through equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) was studied. Some of these samples were submitted to a cryogenic treatment before the ECAP process. The analysis of corrosion behavior of the AA6012 samples was carried out at room temperature by means of electrochemical characterization in 0.1 M Cl⁻ deaerated and aerated solution at pH 2. For this purpose, Tafel plots and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy tests were performed. The evolution of the microstructure was studied by means of SEM and TEM observations. The experimental results show that the cryogenic treatment does not influence the corrosion behavior of the studied alloy submitted to T6 treatment. Moreover, it was found that the ECAP technique does not induce a marked deterioration of the analyzed samples in terms of corrosion resistance.

The description of the dependence of steady-state creep rate on applied stress and temperature is almost invariably based on the Norton equation or on derived power-law relationships. In hot working, the Norton equation does not work, and is therefore usually replaced with the Garofalo (sinh) equation. Both of these equations are phenomenological in nature and can be seldom unambiguously related to microstructural parameters, such as dislocation density, although early efforts in this sense led to the introduction of the “natural power law” with exponent 3. In an attempt to overcome this deficiency, a recent model with sound physical basis has been successfully used to describe the creep response of fcc metals, such as copper. The main advantage of this model is that it does not require any data fitting to predict the strain rate dependence on applied stress and temperature, which is a particularly attractive peculiarity when studying the hot workability of metals. Thus, the model, properly modified to take into account solid solution strengthening effects, has been here applied to the study of the creep and hot-working of simple Al-Mg single phase alloys. The model demonstrated an excellent accuracy in describing both creep and hot working regimes, still maintaining its most important feature, that is, it does not require any fitting of the experimental data.

The effects of postprocessing annealing at 225 °C for 2 h on the creep properties of AlSi10Mg alloy were investigated through constant load experiments carried out at 150 °C, 175 °C and 225 °C. In the range of the experimental conditions here considered, the annealing treatment resulted in an increase in minimum creep rate for a given stress. The reduction in creep strength was higher at the lowest temperature, while the effect progressively vanished as temperature increased and/or applied stress decreased. The minimum creep rate dependence on applied stress was modeled using a physically-based model which took into account the ripening of Si particles at high temperature and which had been previously applied to the as-deposited alloy. The model was successfully validated, since it gave an excellent description of the experimental data.