Influence of severe plastic deformation on aging effect of Al-Zn-Mg-Cu-Zr alloy

The influence of severe plastic deformation (SPD) on aging effects in commercial strongly alloyed Al-Zn-Mg-Cu-Zr alloy was studied. The effect of natural and artificial aging was studied after application of three different processing schemes: (1) usual quenching; (2) SPD in the starting state; (3) SPD at once after quenching. It was shown that SPD process leads to formation of nanocrystalline structure ( d z = 70 nm) providing a high strength state. The attained value of microhardness equal to 2800 MPa is a record and exceeds a correspondent value obtained by traditional methods by a factor of 1.5–2.0.