The use of aluminum alloys, such as 6XXX alloys (Al-Mg-Si-Cu), for automotive applications is steadily growing since it is one of the main ways to reduce the weight of the vehicles. Moreover, with the development of recycle-friendly alloys, significant reductions of greenhouse gases can be achieved for the fabrication phase. However, increasing the amount of recycled fraction in the processing of 6XXX alloys induces changes of alloy composition. Particularly, the increase of content in low solubility species such as Iron and Manganese can have a detrimental effect on the mechanical behavior during the forming processes.

In order to reveal the complex link between the microstructure parameters such as the size or the spatial distribution of the Fe-rich and Mn-rich precipitates and the mechanical properties related to formability, a wide range of compositions and microstructures was generated through gradient casts of iron and multiple downstream transformations. Since this combinatorial approach resulted in a high volume of samples, high throughput characterizations were designed to build an operable database for statistical and machine learning modeling.
On the one hand, to evaluate the microstructure key parameters, large field SEM imaging of Fe intermetallics has been conducted along with automated EDS measurements to determine the respective fractions of alpha and beta phase, their size and spatial distributions. On the other hand, to assess the mechanical response for loading cases relevant to automotive forming of the alloys, systematic tensile tests in the uniaxial and plane strain solicitation states combined with bending tests have been carried out. All these experiments are monitored with Digital Image Correlation (DIC) to get a global and a local strain measurement during the test.
Among the available data, first bending tests have demonstrated the negative effect of the iron and manganese intake on the resulting angle (Figure 1). Future work involves the study the effect of different process parameters.