Effect of impurities on damage nucleation and formability of recycled aluminium alloys – RECYCAL

RECYCAL project aims at understanding and modeling the damage mechanisms operating in recycled aluminium alloys when loaded in plane strain mode. In comparison with reference alloys currently used in transport and packaging sectors, these alloys have a higher content in impurities, especially iron, which often leads to decreasing mechanical performance. RECYCAL is a partnership between Constellium company, Center of Materials, CEMEF and SIMaP laboratory. Its main objective is to predict the impact of microstructural features related to intermetallic particles (size, morphology, nature, spatial distribution) and their environment (matrix’ hardness, crystallographic orientations of grains) on ductility by combining in-situ 3D characterizations at different resolutions and multi-scale simulations. The effect of loading path will also be investigated in-situ by comparing plane strain tension and bending on miniaturized samples under X-ray synchrotron beam. Extension to complex industrial loadings, which are combination of these elementary loadings, will be performed by finite element simulations. The project will be organized in six complementary work packages: 1- Materials fabrication and initial characterization; 2- Observation and quantification of damage in plane strain tension; 3- Observation and quantification of damage in bending; 4- Full-field micromechanical simulations from tomography images of real microstructures; 5- Building of a damage criterion including relevant microstructural features coming from both in-situ observations (WP2 and WP3) and simulations on representative volume elements (WP4) (comparison between a standard statistical approach and a neural network); 6- Upscaling to industrial cases thanks to finite element simulations using the criterion proposed in WP5.