Microstructure and material properties of an Al-Cu alloy provided by the Ohno continuous casting technique

The specific objective in this work is an exploration of the material properties produced by a recently developed continuous casting technique. The study focuses on an Al-Cu alloy provided by the Ohno continuous casting process. The experimental approaches give rise to unusual microstructural characteristic in the cast samples, namely a fine lamellar eutectic structure with unidirectional growth along its axial direction together with a regularly oriented lattice structure. Such microstructural characteristics significantly increase the tensile and fatigue properties. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.