from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Plastic consolidation offers good alternative for traditional scrap recycling, especially for the highly fragmented forms of materials obtained from machining process. In this method aluminum chips were pre-compacted into a form of solid billets and then hot extruded at elevated temperature. Present work describes influence of the temperature and extrusion speed on the mechanical properties of flat 6060 aluminum alloy bars. In order to test different materials morphology, profiles were extruded from two distinctive types of scraps: large chips produced by means of turning process and fine ones produced by CNC machining. Before plastic consolidation chips were pre-compacted to the form of billets with a diameter of 40 mm. Cold compacted billets were then extruded at temperatures of 400 °C and 450 °C with a press ram speed of 3 mm/s. Extrusion ratio of 25 was kept constant during all experiments.Results revealed that mechanical properties of fine chips extrudates exhibit similar properties to those obtained by casting and extrusion procedure. On the other hand, samples prepared from large chips are characterized by lower mechanical properties. Density measurements combined with microstructure observations revealed a very well consolidated material without any porosity, which suggests good quality of chips bonding.
Keywords: recycling, plastic consolidation, hot extruded, aluminum chips© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.