• Brinek, Adam
• Zhu, Yifan
• Simar, Aude
• Pyka, Grzegorz
• Gheysen, Julie
• Chirazi, Ali
• Winiarski, Bart

Abstract

Aluminium alloys are widely used in aerospace and aeronautic industries because of their excellent strength-to-weight ratio. In these applications, overloads can occur, damage the part and lead to its replacement. In order to increase the part’s lifetime, a solution would be to use a material able to heal its damage and restore its continuity. Designing self-healing metals is challenging because the damage is usually healed via solid-state diffusion, which cannot be triggered at room temperature. It requires a heat treatment to trigger the migration of the healing agents and allow the healing of these cracks and/or cavities. However, the damage and its healing are hard to quantify using only surface observations. Additionally, due to a multiscale distribution of the microstructure and damage size, a multiresolution and multimodal imaging approach with a spatial resolution from micro- to nano- scale is required to evidence the microstructure healing efficiency. Correlative tomography (CMT) is a concept/workflow of spatial registration in two and three dimensions (2D and 3D) of many imaging modalities - light microscopy (LM), electron/ion microscopy (EM, IM), X-Ray tomography, 2D/3D EBSD, EDS, Raman, etc.) - that allows various types of information, and at different length-scale, to be collected for the same region of interest (ROI). Therefore, the aim of this research was to develop a robust and controlled multiscale analysis protocol for evaluation of the cracks and pores dimensions within a healable AlMg alloy, using three-dimensional (3D) correlative microscopy/tomography.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• pore
• surface
• tomography
• aluminium
• crack
• strength
• aluminium alloy
• Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy
• electron backscatter diffraction
• porosity
• microscopy