Fatigue Characterization and Fractographic Analysis of Aluminium 6063 Alloy

Abstract

Aluminium and its alloy are widely employed in various automobile and aircraft areas because of their unique specific strength and formability. Al alloys that have been employed in aerospace structural components will undergo dynamic loading, which leads to fatigue due to mechanical stress and thermal conditions. Considering studies toward the low cycle fatigue behaviour of Al alloys are significantly narrowed, this chapter sighted to the analysis of fatigue behaviour of Al 6063 alloy at the various total strain amplitude (TSA) of 0.4% and 0.8%, which performed through the low cycle fatigue testing machine at the frequency rate of 0.2 Hz. The test results show that for 0.4% TSA, the number of cycles to failure (N) is 1786, whereas as the TSA increases, N got reduced. For 0.8% TSA, the cycle to failure is 291 and samples undergone cyclic softening during the test. The rate of cyclic plastic strain raised up with the increase in the TSA. Crack propagation was observed along with the quasi-cleavage fracture for 0.4% TSA and cleavage fracture for 0.8% TSA.