Study on AE properties of A6061-T6 alloy for high-pressure hydrogen gas container during tensile and fatigue testing (Influence of grain size)

Abstract

A6061-T6 alloy has been used in the liner material of high-pressure hydrogen gas storage container that is mounted on a fuel cell vehicle. The degradation of the properties such as strength, toughness and hydrogen embrittlement resistance, etc., has been pointed out, because the grain structure of the mouthpiece part of the liner becomes coarse in the manufacturing process. The tensile and fatigue test for the specimens with different grain size were done, and the detected AE signals during the testing were analyzed. In the tensile test, the characteristics of the signals on dislocation motion, transgranular and intergranular fracture were extracted. In the fatigue test, it was shown that the possibility of which the damage is evaluated by the spectral analysis that utilizes the slope of an approximation straight line in the both logarithmic scale display of FFT analysis result. Then we proposed the amplitude ratio Rv that is the parameter which divided the maximum amplitude of signal for intergranular fracture by that of detected signal, and the correlation between the grain size and the Rv was recognized. These proposed information are able to be utilized in order to evaluate the damage of the container.

Keywords

• acoustic emission
• aluminum alloy
• grain size
• fracture
• fatigue
• nondestructive evaluation