Heat treatment of copper and copper alloys

The aim of heat treatment is to enable products to be transformed by homogenizing their composition and foundry structure and eliminating the work-hardening caused by cold deformation, and to give the resulting products the characteristics they need for use, such as mechanical and electrical properties, or corrosion resistance.

The heat treatments covered by this article are :

• homogenization treatment on the as-cast state;

• relaxation or detensioning ;

• recrystallization annealing ;

• solution treatment, quenching, precipitation hardening ;

• solution treatment, quenching, hardening tempering by spinodal decomposition;

• martensitic hardening - memory effect ;

• hardening by order-disorder transformation.