Effect of alloying with zinc on SFE of aluminium by study of lattice imperfections in cold worked Al-Zn alloys

A detailed X-ray Fourier line shape analysis has been performed on three compositions of Al-Zn alloys viz. Al-3.55 wt% Zn, Al-14.7 wt% Zn and Al-19.3 wt% Zn infcc phase. It has been found that deformation stacking faults, both intrinsic ά and extrinsic α are absent in the cold worked state and twin fault β is found to be slightly present in the deformed lattice of the two initial compositions of the alloys. Similar to the effect of solute germanium and copper, respectively in Al-Ge and Al-Cu systems, hexagonal zinc also fails to impart faulting infcc Al-Zn system. This corroborates the fact that aluminium has high stacking fault energy.