The Evaluation of the Fracture Surface in the AW-6060 T6 Aluminium Alloy under a Wide Range of Loads

The present study focused on the behaviour of the AW-6060 aluminium alloy in peak temper condition T6 under a wide range of loads: tensile loading, projectile and explosion. The alloy is used as a structural component of civil engineering structures exposed to static or dynamic loads. Therefore, it was crucial to determine the material's behaviour at low and intermediate rates of deformation. Despite the fact that the evaluation of the strain rate sensitivity of the AW-6060 aluminium alloy has already been discussed in literature, the authors of this paper wished to further investigate this topic. They conducted tensile tests and confirmed the thesis that the AW-6060 T6 aluminium alloy has low strain rate sensitivity at room temperature. In addition, the fracture surfaces subjected to different loading (tensile loading, projectile and explosion) were investigated and compared using a scanning electron microscope, because the authors of this paper were trying to develop a new methodology for predicting how samples had been loaded before failure occurred based on scanning electron microscopy (SEM) micrographs. Projectile and explosion tests were performed mainly for the SEM observation of the fracture surfaces. These tests were unconventional and they represent the originality of this research. It was found that the type of loading had an impact on the fracture surface.