Recent Developments in High Strength Aluminium Alloys

As The strength of aluminium alloys is increased, other desirable properties are increasingly sacrificed and, as with other metallic materials, a major difficulty in developing better strong alloys is to assess these other properties in terms which are satisfactory indices of service performance. This difficulty becomes more acute as strength is increased and further progress demands that supplier and user are in the closest possible agreement on methods of assessing the properties involved and on where the line must be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable material behaviour. Discussion of this aspect of strong light alloy development is always opportune and much of what is said in this paper is intended to provoke constructive discussion between supplier and user on this subject.