Correlation of Thermodynamic Calculations and Mechanical Properties of an Al-Si Cast Alloy

Recycling Al-Si cast alloys with an increasing amount of contaminating elements are sensitive to the formation of certain secondary phases, especially in the case of slow solidification. This demands a profound understanding of typical recycling impurity elements’ influence (e.g. Fe, Cu) on the resulting alloy’s microstructure and mechanical properties. In this work, the following questions were investigated and discussed for the alloy AlSi8ZnMn: Does CALPHAD calculation predict the presence of detrimental phases in the model recycling cast alloy studied here? Do the mechanical properties deviate from primary-based alloys? Can the findings of the practical experiments be correlated with the CALPHAD results? It was found that Cu, very often mentioned as detrimental in cast alloy, can be used in a higher concentration range than expected while the influence of Fe turned out to be more crucial.