When hot forging 7075 aluminum alloy, as a military material durable enough for most of its applications, it needs to be heat-treated to ensure the target material property achieves the application requirements. However, the material properties change because of heat throughout usage. In this study, a new approach was devised to heat treat the alloy to prevent material property changes. The study further clarified the effect of rapid heat treatment on the high-temperature resistance of a hot forging 7075 aluminum alloy. Infrared (IR) heat treatment was used as a rapid heating technique to effectively replace the conventional resistance heat (RH) treatment method. Our experimental result showed that IR heat treatment resulted in better age hardening at the initial aging stage, where its tensile strength and elongation appeared like that of a resistance heat treatment. More so, based on hardness and tensile test results, the IR-heated treatment process inhibited the phase transformation of precipitations at a higher temperature, improving high-temperature softening resistance and enhancing the thermal stability of the hot forging 7075 aluminum alloy.

Post-forging heat treatment is often necessary to achieve the mechanical properties required for aluminum alloy forged parts. In this study, hot-forged 6082 suspension parts are used to study the effect of rapid infrared (IR) heat treatment. The insoluble particles present in the matrix after the solutionizing process are observed. Experimental results show that using rapid IR heat treatment leads to superior solutionizing, and thus a larger critical onset strain in serrated tensile flow. The rapid IR heat treatment also had a more significant precipitation effect, which enhanced the mechanical properties of the material.

To avoid the phenomenon of abnormal grain coarsening, and increase the Young’s modulus of forgings, an infrared heat treatment was used on different mass forgings and compared with the results of an air furnace heat treatment. This work focused on the effects of microstructural evolution and the mechanical properties of two different mass 6082 real forgings. The experimental results show that infrared heat treatment can effectively reduce the mass effect after heat treatment, inhibit the coarse grains formed, and keep the non-equiaxed grains along the metal flows, thus significantly improving the ductility of the material. In addition, the rapid heating characteristic of infrared can effectively shorten the duration of heat treatment and greatly enhance the Young’s modulus and the vibration resistance of 6082 entity forgings.