Effect of Heat Treatment Conditions on Microstructures and Mechanical Properties of Cu-9Ni-6Sn-0.22Nb Alloy

Due to its high strength, excellent electrical conductivity and high resistance to stress corrosion, Cu-Ni-Sn alloy has been selected as a kind of advanced metal material which can be used as the manufacture of springs, connectors, bearings and so on. In addition, the addition of Nb can efficiently improve the comprehensive properties of the alloy. In the present work, the effect of heat treatment conditions on microstructure and mechanical properties were studied in a Cu-9Ni-6Sn-0.22Nb alloy by means of optical microscopy (OM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), tensile test and microhardness tests. The results show that before ageing, a large number of fine γ precipitates with DO22type structure are distributed on the matrix. With the prolongation of ageing time, the ultimate tensile strength (UTS), yield strength (YS) and Vickers hardness increased firstly, and then decline. The reason can be attributed to the occurrence of spinodal decomposition and the formation of discontinuous precipitation (DP). At first, spinodal decomposition induced the enhanced interaction between dislocations and internal stress field, resulting in an increase of mechanical properties. Then the increased DP at grain boundaries leads to the decline of strength in the material. Finally, the relationship between the microstructure and the electrical conductivity was also analyzed, and the results show that the electrical conductivity increased with ageing time/ageing temperature increasing for the present alloy. Through the analysis of Matthiessen’ s rule, the variation of electrical resistivity depends on precipitates, solute atoms, dislocations, vacancies and grain boundaries, and the precipitates play an important role among them. Besides, more precipitates improve electrical conductivity. Therefore, the increase of ageing time/ageing temperature induced the increase of DP, resulting in an increase of electrical conductivity.