Thermal impact on laboratory-scale heat treatment samples during elevated temperature ageing for short duration

From an alloy design viewpoint, it has become increasingly important to better understand the
RHP at the earliest stages of the decomposition of the supersaturated solid solution in Al-CuMg
and Al-Zn-Mg-Cu alloys [1,2], to determine the cause of the very significant change in
mechanical properties after a short period of ageing. Research of this nature requires very
short ageing heat treatments (in the order of seconds to minutes) to study the expected atomic
clustering reactions and so strict experimental conditions need to be observed to achieve good
results. This paper aims to determine the thermal impact due to the application of short periods
of elevated temperature ageing to scientific scale specimens by theoretical calculations
using the lumped capacitance model, and by experiments, to compare the time it takes to
reach a set-point temperature for various conditions.