Heat Treating with Al-Si Alloys
This Heat Treat Today Original Content piece offers a closer look at a resource for metallurgists: Al-Si Alloy: Automotive, Aeronautical, and Aerospace Applications.The authors of the book, Dr. Francisco Robles-Hernandez, Dr. Jose Martin Herrera Ramírez, and Dr. Robert Ian Mackay, collaborated in the making of this reference text for students and practicing heat treaters. The information below has been provided by Dr. Mackay and was composed by Heat Treat Today editors.
Dr. Robert Ian Mackay, M.Sc., M.Eng., Ph.D., P.Eng., at Nemak has spent nearly 25 years in industry, but also can lay claim to a history in academia. He joined in the authoring of Al-Si Alloy: Automotive, Aeronautical, and Aerospace Applications with Dr. Francisco Robles-Hernandez and Dr. Jose Martin Herrera Ramírez to lend his expertise to “[bridge] the gap between fundamental science and its application to industrial metal casting and heat treatment.” Aluminum silicon (Al-Si) is one of the most prolific alloys, as this book notes, and thus describes major characteristics of the alloy as well as its application in the key fields of automotive, aeronautical, and aerospace.
Covering aluminum metal casting science, the book explores content such as thermal analysis methods, mechanical testing, casting processes. Of the nine chapters, Dr. Mackay emphasizes chapters 3 and 6 as being particularly helpful to heat treaters. Chapter 3 details the important casting processes used in Al-Si alloy metal casting, and further highlights “the heat treat process and their specific temper designation as specified by the Aluminum Association (e.g. T5, T6 and T7 for metal casting),” Dr. Mackay notes. He comments that the way one heat treats an aerospace precision sand casting differs from an automotive high pressure die casting (HPDC), making this section particularly valuable.
In the second heat treat noteworthy chapter, the authors examine mechanical properties of the alloy. “This is the part of the textbook,” comments Dr. Mackay, “that is specifically controlled by the heat treat process. Throughout this chapter references to T5, T6 and T7 tempers are made as they do influence not only the type of mechanical testing that is performed, but also the casting properties that are achieved.”
Al-Si Alloys will be a helpful reference guide to heat treaters; while the use of the text is primarily academic, the book was designed to enable people to access information without studying the entirety of the book. Other features that one could reference in the book are the historical discovery that mechanical strength could be improved by processing aluminum castings, the implementation of this improved structural component in WWII military aircraft, and Dr. Mackay’s deliberate contribution of a “detailed description of testing methods used and their interpretation for metal casting quality.”
The book is available in hardcover, softcover, and e-book formats. To access the e-book , or to download select chapters, one can visit the website of the publisher, Springer Nature. See here.
To contact Dr. Robert Mackay, you can reach him via his LinkedIn profile here.
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