Experimental Study of Voids in High Strength Aluminum Alloys

The ductile failure in metals has long been associated with void nucleation, growth and coalescence. Many micromechanics-based damage models were developed to study the effects of the voids sizes, shape and orientation to the nucleation, growth and coalescence of voids [1-2]. However, the experimental methods to quantitatively validate these models were lacking. In this work, the ductility and the microstructural characteristics of the voids in high strength aluminum is investigated. The particular material interested in this work is high strength rolled Aluminum 7075-T7351.