Precipitation hardening in the first aerospace aluminum alloy: the wright flyer crankcase.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 17779943.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Aluminum has had an essential part in aerospace history from its very inception: An aluminum copper alloy (with a copper composition of 8 percent by weight) was used in the engine that powered the historic first flight of the Wright brothers in 1903. Examination of this alloy shows that it is precipitation-hardened by Guinier-Preston zones in a bimodal distribution, with larger zones (10 to 22 nanometers) originating in the casting practice and finer ones (3 nanometers) resulting from ambient aging over the last 90 years. The precipitation hardening in the Wright Flyer crankcase occurred earlier than the experiments of Wilm in 1909, when such hardening was first discovered, and predates the accepted first aerospace application of precipitation-hardened aluminum in 1910.