Abstract

New area industry of Albania, in recent years, factories with closed cycle of production and processing of aluminium alloys are being targeted. In Albania about 25,000 tons of aluminum alloys per year are produced and there is a tendency to increase this production. This reality has encouraged us to undertake a number of studies with the primary objective for optimizing the parameters of the basic process of this industry. In this article we focus on the process of artificially aging aluminum alloys. From early and newer studies [2], the importance and delicacy of temperature-time parameters in the evolution of microstructure and in the mechanical properties of the final product are recognized and underlined. We have impost an experimental planning based on the Response Surface Method by choosing Central Composite Design to optimize the temperature and time parameters for the artificial aging with the object ive of maximizing the process indicator – mechanical properties, hardness in our case. The plan includes 13 tests with 5 replicas in the center of the experiment, built with the help of Design-Expert DX7 and DX13 software. The focus of our attention was the assesment of the design, analysis of residuals and diagnostic diagrams and forms of presentation of results: mathematical model, 3D response surface, isocontours and effects of interaction between factors. In the future works we will present the experimental results of the optimization of the artificial aging process for different aluminium alloys produced in Albania.