Influence of the thermomechanical processing on the fracture mechanisms of high strength aluminium/pure aluminium multilayer laminate materials

The microstructure and mechanical properties, with emphasis in the impact fracture toughness behaviour, of two multilayer laminate materials have been investigated. The multilayer materials are constituted by alternated sheets of pure aluminium (Al 1200 or Al 1050) and high strength Al 7075 alloy. Stacked layers of these alloys have been successfully joined using two processing routes with different total hot rolling strains. Both laminates have been tested at room temperature under impact Charpy tests, 3-point bend tests and shear tests on the interfaces. Both laminates exhibited more than eight times improvement in impact fracture toughness over the monolithic Al 7075-T6. The toughness increase in the higher rolling strained laminate is almost entirely due to crack blunting mechanism, while in the lower strained laminate, crack deflection by delamination and crack renucleation processes were active.Financial support from CICYT (Project MAT2003-01172) is gratefully acknowledged. C.M. Cepeda-Jiménez thanks the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science for a Juan de la Cierva contract. We also thank L. del Real-Alarcón for the welding work, F.F. González-Rodríguez for assistance during hot rolling and J. Chao- Hermida for assistance with the Charpy impact test.Peer reviewe