ABSTRACT
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The present authors have collaborated since 2000 on revitalizing and extending the technology for metallurgical aspects of quenching heat-treatable aluminum alloys, which had been developed by Dr. James T. Staley, Sr. starting with Staley (1966) and continued until his ret irement from Alcoa three decades later. Our objective in this chapter is a con cise and current overview of what came before us and what we have added. For this we have
surveyed the open literature as well as Alcoa les going back into the 1940s, excluding any details that might still be con sidered proprietary. We suppose our reader to be s oundly grounded in metallurgical engineering, but not necessarily with any knowledge speci c to aluminum. We have excluded the topic of quench-aging, the combination of quenching and aging into a continuous process, as a substantive survey would be heavy in proprietary concepts and sophisticated metallurgy. We have also excluded thermal and mechanical aspects of quenching aluminum alloys, as well as equipment and quenchants used in fabrication of a luminum products. O n t hese topics, much of t he i nformation presented elsewhere in this book is generally applicable to aluminum. We conclude with our views on what has been established, how to use it, and where to go next with the techniques pioneered by our mutual mentor, Dr. James T. Staley.
