j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 7 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 107–111

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmatprotec

Effect of cooling rate on solidified microstructure

and mechanical properties of aluminium-A356 alloy

L.Y. Zhang a,b,c,∗ , Y.H. Jiang a , Z. Ma a , S.F. Shan c , Y.Z. Jia b , C.Z. Fan c , W.K. Wang c
a School of Mechanical Engineering, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin 123000, PR China
b School of Materials Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, PR China
c State key laboratory of Metastable Materials Science and Technology, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao 066004, PR China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A fast-cooling technology using a copper mould cooled by a phase-transition medium was
Received 17 February 2006 used to prepare cast aluminium-A356 alloy by solidification of the melt. The cooling rate
Received in revised form achieved with this technique is in the order of 102 K/s. As-cast samples with a diameter
12 October 2007 of 10 mm were produced. The microstructure and mechanical properties of this alloy have
Accepted 16 December 2007 been investigated. The results show that both the primary and secondary dendrite arm
spacing (DAS) are better refined by using this technology than with a conventional casting
method. The cooling rate can be controlled to some extent by changing the amount of
Keywords: cooling medium. The DAS decreases with increasing cooling rate, and the microhardness
Fast cooling and strength increase correspondingly.
Aluminium alloys © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Dendrite arm spacing
Strength
Microhardness

1. Introduction
Cast aluminium-A356 alloy is one of the most well-developed
aluminium alloys due to its outstanding properties. It is widely
employed in numerous automotive and industrial weight
sensitive applications, such as aeronautics and space flight,
because of its low density and excellent castability.
Actually, in most cases high-level mechanical properties
are needed for industrial applications, so the performance
of this alloy has been the subject of many micromechanical
investigations (López et al., 2003; Gokhale and Patel, 2005; Yu
et al., 1999; Yang et al., 2005). Since the strength and hardness
of alloys mainly depend on their microstructure, a lot of efforts
have been made to refine the microstructure of the castings
in order to enhance the mechanical properties of aluminium-
A356 alloy. Adding modifier and refiner (Wang et al., 2003;
Liao et al., 2002) to the melt is a common way of doing this,
and has been adopted by many researchers. Power ultrasound
(Jian et al., 2005) and electromagnetic stirring (Jung et al., 2001)
have also been used to refine the microstructure of alloys.
The methods mentioned above have been used by many
researchers in recent years and their effect on refining the
microstructure is known to some extent. However, there has
been little research on refining the microstructure by improv-
ing the bulk melt’s cooling rate. To our knowledge, a water-
cooled copper mould is an effective fast-cooling method.
However, the cooling rate achieved by this method is limited
and is difficult to control for use in bulk-casting Al alloy.
Therefore, a novel method, that is a cast copper mould with
phase-transition materials as the cooling medium is adopted

∗
Corresponding author at: School of Mechanical Engineering, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin 123000, PR China. Tel.: +86 418 3351385;
fax: +86 418 3351385.
E-mail address: zhangly6244@yahoo.com.cn (L.Y. Zhang).
0924-0136/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2007.12.059
108 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 7 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 107–111
Table 1 – Physical properties of Sn
Element
Density (g cm−3 )
Melting point (K)
Specific heat (J/kg K)
Heat conductivity (W/m K)
Latent heat of solidification (J/kg)
Expansion coefficient (×10−6 /K)
here to refine the casting of aluminium-A356 alloy. The results
show that the dendrites are more refined than in conventional
casting methods. The strength and microhardness of A356
alloy solidified in a fine microstructure have been investigated.
2. Experimental details
Commercial A356 aluminium alloy was used in this experi-
ment, for which the nominal composition (wt.%) was 6.5–7.5Si,
0.25–0.45Mg, 0.08–0.20Ti, Fe < 0.2, with the balance being Al.
The alloy ingot was remelted in a vacuum induction fur-
nace with an argon atmosphere and kept for 10 min to make
the melt homogeneous. The melt was then poured into cop-
per moulds cooled by a phase-transition medium and water,
respectively. Sn was used as the phase-transition cooling
medium for its physical properties in this experiment, and
the physical properties of Sn are listed in Table 1. Sn absorbed
much heat when it was melt. The melt of A356 alloy was cooled
just by this kind of heat, i.e., latent heat. So the cooling rate
of melt increases with the increasing of Sn and reach a maxi-
mum value for a given amount of Sn. But when the amount of
Sn is beyond this amount, it cannot be melt and the effect of
cooling is weakened. Therefore, different cooling rates of the
melt could be obtained by changing the amount of Sn.
A schematic diagram of the cooling device with a phase-
transition medium is shown in Fig. 1. The solid Sn was
remelted and poured slowly into the container. When it
became semi-solid, the columnar-shaped copper mould with
a NiCr–NiAl thermal couple in the center of copper mould,
Fig. 1 – Schematic diagram of cooling device with
phase-transition material.
which was shown in Fig. 1, was inserted into it and became
fixed as the Sn solidified. The melt’s temperature was detected
Sn by the thermal couple and recorded by an X–Y recorder.
7.3 For metallographic observation, specimens 10 mm in diam-
504.9 eter were prepared in the normal manner, ground and
226.09 polished on a burnishing machine. Specimens were etched
66.99 in 0.5% HF for 15 s and observed with a MEIJI optical micro-
6.07 × 104
scope. The as-cast dendrite arm spacing (DAS) was measured
23
in specimens obtained from the bars cast with different cool-
ing rates.
The microhardness was measured using a Vickers pyrami-
dal indenter with a fixed load (50 g) and loading time (10 s)
on an HVS-1000 digital microhardness apparatus. The hard-
ness values are the averages of at least 10 indentations. Tensile
tests were performed at room temperature on a Gleeble-3500
apparatus (Gleeble-3500, DSI, USA) using flat specimens with
a 6 mm gauge length and a 2 mm × 2 mm gauge cross-section.
An 8 × 10−3 mm s−1 cross-head speed was used. The mean of
a minimum of three tensile specimens was taken to give a
meaningful data point.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Microstructure observation
Fig. 2 shows optical micrographs of specimens prepared with a
copper mould cooled by using a phase-transition medium and
water, respectively. The site of the microstructures was shown
in Fig. 1 and they were taken in the same place. As can be seen,
both them exhibited an ordinary dendrite structure consisting
of primary ␣-Al dendrites and modified eutectic Si particles,
but the main difference between them was that both of the pri-
mary and secondary dendrite arms of ␣-Al on the specimen
obtained using the copper mould cooled with Sn (Fig. 2(a)) were
more refined than those obtained with the water-cooled cop-
per mould (Fig. 2(b)). The homogeneously distributed eutectic
silicon particles in Fig. 2(a) were much smaller than those in
Fig. 2(b).
The changes of microstructure were caused mainly by the
different cooling rates of the melt. It is well known that the
solidification rate plays an important role in the refinement of
metal structures, and it significantly affects the mechanical
properties. A high cooling rate and a short solidification time
can lead to the formation of a more refined microstructure,
an extended solute solubility and even metastable phases
(Cantor, 2001; Jones, 1996; Haga et al., 2003; Katgerman and
Dom, 2004).
3.2. Effect of cooling rate on DAS
As mentioned above, the DAS is mainly determined by the
cooling rate. For the same alloys, the different DASs corre-
spond to the relevant cooling rate, which depends on the
different casting techniques, such as sand mould casting, per-
manent mould, etc. In this experiment the cooling rate is
controlled by changing the amount of the cooling medium.
The DASs obtained for a copper mould cooled with phase-
transition medium depend on the different cooling rates. Fig. 3
shows the relationship between DAS and cooling rate, and the
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 7 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 107–111
Fig. 2 – Optical microstructure of as-cast A356 alloys: (a) copper mould with phase-transition medium; (b) water-cooled
copper mould.
slowest cooling rate obtained by this technique, which is about
100 K s−1 .
3.3. Effect of cooling rate on microhardness
Different cooling rates were obtained for the copper mould
cooled with phase-transition material. The microhardness of
specimens produced with different cooling rates was mea-
sured and the results are shown in Fig. 4. It can be seen that the
microhardness increases with the increasing of cooling rates.
A fast cooling rate generally refines the microstructure and
increases the solid solubilities of the alloying elements in solid
solution. This also happened with this technique. The refined
microstructure can be seen in Fig. 2, and more dendritic ␣-Al
phase is present. On the one hand, this improved the micro-
hardness (Liao et al., 2002) of the A356 alloy, on the other
hand, the DASs of the alloys also have an effect on the micro-
hardness, as shown in Fig. 4. One can clearly see that the
hardness decreases with increasing DAS. Similar results have
been investigated in Ref. (Jing, 2002), and are shown in Fig. 5,
the mechanical properties being approximately linear with
DAS. The main reason for this is that the distribution of micro-
porosities, intergranular segregation and impurity segregation
becomes even with decreasing of DAS. The other reasons for
this are as follows: the DAS has a reverse correlation with the
cooling rate, as can be seen in Fig. 3, and a fast cooling rate
Fig. 3 – Relationship between DAS and cooling rate.
109
was obtained with a copper mould by using a phase-transition
medium, which can refine the microstructure and increase the
solid solubilities of silicon in the ␣-Al phase. The metastable
solubility of silicon in the ␣-Al phase, calculated using the
Al–Si system as a model (Bendijk et al., 1980), is given in the
following equation
2
a294K = 0.40491 − 0.0174xSi − 0.0144xSi (1)
where a is the lattice parameter (nm) of homogeneous fcc
aluminium–silicon solid solutions and xSi is the atomic frac-
tion of silicon. The solubility is in the range 2.0–3.28 at.% Si;
the actual value depends on the cooling rate and exceeds the
equilibrium value, which is 0.06 at.% Si.
Thus, supersaturated solid solutions are formed. The dif-
ference in atomic radius between these alloying elements
provides a strain field, which induces more resistance to the
deformation due to the interaction between the strain field
and the dislocations. This resistance is usually called the
solid-solution strength. Similar results have been reported for
a rapidly solidified Al-based alloy (Inoue, 1998; Uzun et al.,
2004). In solid mechanics, the material hardness is described
as the resistance to deformation. In addition, plastic flow pro-
cesses in crystalline solids are inherently size dependent over
a scale that ranges from a fraction of micron to a hundred
Fig. 4 – Effect of cooling rate on microhardness.
110 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s p r o c e s s i n g t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 7 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 107–111
Fig. 5 – Effect of DAS on ultimate tensile strength (UTS).
microns or so, with smaller being harder. One source of this
size dependence is that internal obstacles, such as incoher-
ent precipitates and grain and phase boundaries, restrict glide,
leading to dislocation pile-ups that further restrict dislocation
motion. As a consequence, the mechanical properties increase
as the scale of the microstructure decreases.
The microhardness of as-cast samples made with a cop-
per mould cooled with phase-transition medium is higher
than that with conventional water cooling, which is about
500–600 MPa, this is mainly due to the larger cooling rate.
3.4. Effect of cooling rate on strength
The total yield strength (YSt ) of as-cast A356 alloy is reported
to be the sum of the yield strength of pure aluminium (YS0 )
and the contributions due to eutectic Si particles (YSSi ) and
alloying elements in the solid solution (YSSS,el ) (Rometsch
and Schaffer, 2002):
YSt = YS0 + YSSi + YSSS,el
Since the content of Mg, Ti and Fe in A356 alloy is less
than 0.5 wt%, YSSS,Mg , YSSS,Ti and YSSS,Fe can be ignored.
Consequently, Eq. (2) can be written as
YSt = YS0 + YSSi + YSSS,Si
The yield strength of pure aluminium is related to the DAS
of the Al phase, as shown in Fig. 5 (Liao et al., 2002). As men-
tioned above, the DAS depends on the cooling rate, so the yield
strength of pure aluminium is determined by the cooling rate
of the melt.
According to the theory of Labusch (Haasen, 1978), the con-
tribution to the strength of a solid solution is related to the
relative change of lattice parameter which can be expressed
as
d ln a
ı=
dB
where a is the lattice parameter of ␣-Al and ␯B is the concen-
tration of Si in ␣-Al. The amount of Si in ␣-Al increased with
increasing cooling rate and has been calculated using Eq. (1).
The coarser eutectic fibrous Si phase which surrounds the
␣-Al observed in the eutectic region under quenching condi-
tions has greatly deteriorated the strength and elongation of
A356 alloy, but it is not known to what degree such Si particles
may influence the yield strength.
Since the microstructure of A356 alloys includes dendritic
␣-Al and eutectic Si particles, that obtained using a copper
mould cooled with phase-transition medium is much more
refined than that obtained using a water-cooled copper mould
and the strength of the A356 alloy is greatly improved. So cast-
ing using a copper mould with a phase-transition medium is
a superior method for the casting industry and other areas.
4. Conclusions
Copper mould casting with cooling by a phase-transition
medium is a potential method for fast solidification. This
method can clearly refine the microstructure with a larger
cooling rate, and has a superior cooling ability than a water-
cooled copper mould, as proved by the microstructure of the
as-cast samples. The relationship between the DAS of A356
and the cooling rate agrees with the classical formula. In addi-
tion, different cooling rates can be obtained by this technique.
The microhardness increases with decreasing DAS, that is, it
increases when the cooling rate increases. The reason for this
is probably that the larger cooling rate caused an extended
solid solution to be formed and refined the microstructure.
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