Advantages and Disadvantages of Aluminium Alloy Plate
Plate aluminium is used across a variety of industrial applications, including building and construction claddings. It’s also commonly used in transport, car and caravan components.
There are a few things to bear in mind when it comes to choosing the best aluminium alloy plate for your specific requirements. The most important factors are: Formability – elongation and strength versus ductility;
Durability
Aluminum alloy plate is used in a variety of industries, particularly in the aerospace sector, where its light weight helps to improve fuel efficiency and overall aircraft performance. Nevertheless, like other metals, aluminium plates can suffer from a range of defects that compromise their quality and usability. These include dents, scratches, emulsion marks and pressure or imprint marks. In addition, they can also show acid or alkali stains, water stains and surface dullness, or exhibit patterns and color streaks.
During the rolling process, some of the plate’s edges tend to stretch more than the central part. This results in the formation of waves that can be characterized by their height, spacing and frequency, which directly affects usability. An effective combination of roller initial crown, increased cooling and reducing roller deflection can help to eliminate these edge waves.
Another important factor in determining the durability of aluminium plate is its ability to resist corrosion. This is primarily determined by the aluminium’s microstructure and the strength of its aluminium alloy plate grain boundaries. However, these properties can be compromised by factors such as:
Corrosion Resistance
Aluminium and its alloys have long been employed for applications in the environment where corrosion resistance is critical. Their excellent corrosion resistance is largely due to the formation of an aluminium oxide film that is both very stable in near-neutral solutions of non-halide salts and which rapidly re-forms on damage (passivation).
This protective barrier, however, is not fully effective in open air solutions containing halides such as chlorine or bromine since these ions can penetrate and attack the metal by a combination of chemical and electrochemical mechanisms. The aluminium metal can corrode by the formation of pitting and crevice corrosion in these conditions as shown in Figure 4.
Nevertheless, in most environments, the performance of aluminium is very good and it is relatively easy to design an alloy with a specific corrosion resistance for particular environments. This understanding is important as it allows the selection of a suitable alloy for an application with a known corrosion risk.
Alloying with copper, magnesium or other elements improves the corrosion resistance of aluminium, and can also increase its strength and hardness. For example, the 2024 aluminium alloy is an aluminum-copper alloy with good formability and strength, as well as excellent corrosion resistance. Aluminium-magnesium alloys are used in aerospace applications because they can be welded to steel, which provides superior strength and stiffness.
Lightweight
Aluminium alloy plate is a lightweight material with a higher strength-to-weight ratio than many other construction materials. It can be machined to precision, reducing overall fabrication costs and production time. Aluminum is also environmentally friendly because it can be recycled without losing its properties, and it does not rust in an untreated state.
The machinability of aluminium plate is a result of its low porosity, which contributes to superior anodizing and hardening response, dimensional stability, and fatigue resistance. It also enables greater cutting speeds and feed rates than other metals. Additionally, aluminum plates have an extremely high conductivity, which makes them easy carbon steel manufacturer to heat and cool. This allows for faster cutting and machining, as well as increased productivity and efficiency.
Plate aluminium is used in a wide range of applications, including aerospace and military, transportation product manufacturing, and storage tanks. Some varieties of the metal perform exceptionally well in very cold temperatures, which makes them suitable for use as the skins of spacecraft and jet fuel tanks.
The MIC-6 variant of plate aluminium is produced using a patented casting process, which ensures that the alloy has a fine-grained structure with a low density and low porosity. This, in turn, increases mechanical strength and corrosion resistance. After casting, the aluminium undergoes thermal treatment to remove internal stresses. This results in a material that is more durable than other aluminium products and can be used for CNC machined components, aerospace tooling, precision engineering, and mold making.
Aesthetics
When most people think of aluminum, they might picture soft drink cans or other common household items. However, this remarkable element is much more versatile than that. It has a host of unique attributes that make it popular with manufacturers, including an excellent strength-to-weight ratio and the ability to be easily shaped and formed into parts.
This makes aluminum alloys ideal for a wide variety of applications, from the building frame of skyscrapers to the high-performance alloy wheels of racing cars. In fact, many of the most impressive structures in modern architecture could not have been built without the advantages offered by this lightweight material.
Most aluminum alloys have a natural metallic silver-gray color, but this can be changed with the help of different surface treatments. These include anodizing, painting, or powder coating. These techniques can also alter an alloy’s corrosion resistance, thermal conductivity, and electrical properties.
In general, the term “aluminum plate” refers to any piece of flat aluminum that’s thicker than a quarter of an inch. This type of product is typically made by flattening aluminum ingots using large rollers. The process is similar to that used to create steel sheets and bars, but the final product has better corrosion resistance than most steels. This is why it’s often used for automotive panels. A type of aluminum plate known as 7075 is particularly good for this application because it has improved strength and weldability.