10 High Strength Al-Alloys: Microstructure, Corrosion and Principles of Protection Anthony E. Hughes!, Nick Birbilis?, Johannes M.C. Mol, Santiago J. Garcia®, Xiaorong Zhout and George E. Thompson* ICSIRO Materials Science and Technology, Melbourne 2Department of Materials Engineering, Monash University, Clayton STU Delft, Department of Materials Science andl Engineering’ and Novel Aerospace Materials, Aerospace Engineering’, Delft 4School of Materials, The University of Manchester, Manchester "Australia SNetherlands “United Kingdom 1. Introduction Aluminium alloys have highly heterogeneous microstructures compared to many other metal alloys. This heterogeneity originates from alloy additions and impurities which combine to produce both the desired microstructure as well as undesired, large particles, called constituent particles (and residual impurity particles) which have a range of compositions. In corrosion science these latter particles are commonly referred to as intermetallic (IM) particles. The heterogeneous nature of aluminium alloys is most evident in members of the high strength alloys of the 2xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx and 8xxx and most particularly the 2xxx series alloys where alloy additions are required to obtain the high strength to weight ratio properties of these materials. For many years now, the study of corrosion in these alloys was, and in many instances continues to be, a phenomenological exercise. So the literature on this subject largely involves studies of a small number of intermetallic (IM) particles under a variety of conditions which are difficult to relate to each other in order to form a more general model of corrosion in highly heterogeneous aluminium alloys. This is particularly true for the 2xxx series of alloys which lacks a system to unambiguously categorise these IM particles compositional variation makes it difficult to relate these particles with well know composition, crystallography and electrochemistry. The difficulty in devising such a system should not be underestimated since the intermetallic particles form at various stages during manufacture, individual particles have compositionally different phase domains and their distribution including the spatial relationship to one another is often dictated by the processing route. Nevertheless, in recent years there have been significant advances in the understanding of both the microstructure of some high strength alloys as well as its influence on corrosion. These advances have their foundations in the wider accessibility to a range of newer electrochemical and physico- chemical characterisation techniques. The use of advanced electrochemical techniques has led to a greater understanding of the properties of the intermetallic particles themselves and www intechopen.com