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

RecyclingRecycling Al-Si cast alloysAlloys with an increasing amount of contaminating elements are sensitive to the formationFormation of certain secondary phases, especially in the case of slow solidificationSolidification. This demands a profound understanding of typical recyclingRecycling impurity elements’ influence (e.g. Fe, Cu) on the resulting alloyAlloys’s microstructureMicrostructure and mechanical propertiesMechanical properties. In this work, the following questions were investigated and discussed for the alloyAlloys AlSi8ZnMn: Does CALPHAD calculation predict the presence of detrimental phases in the model recyclingRecycling cast alloyAlloys studied here? Do the mechanical propertiesMechanical properties deviate from primary-based alloysAlloys? 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 alloyAlloys, can be used in a higher concentration range than expected while the influence of Fe turned out to be more crucial.