Modarres Razavi, Sonia (2011-12). Effect of Texture on Formability and Mechanical Anisotropy of a Severe Plastically Deformed Magnesium Alloy. Master's Thesis.
Thesis
Magnesium and its alloys have been considered as alternatives to aluminum alloys and steels for structural applications in automotive and aerospace applications due to their superior specific strength and light-weight. However, they have hexagonal-close packed (hcp) structure, and thus have a small number of deformation systems resulting in low ductility and formability near room temperature, anisotropic thermo-mechanical response and strong deformation textures. The aim of this work is to investigate experimentally the effect of crystallographic texture generated during severe plastic deformation (SPD), on the subsequent formability and mechanical flow anisotropy in AZ31B Mg alloy. The proper control of grain size and texture through SPD is expected to result in better low temperature formability and better control of mechanical flow anisotropy.
AZ31B Mg alloy has been successfully processed using equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE) following different processing routes, multiple passes, and different processing temperatures, in order to obtain samples with a wide variety of grain sizes, ranging from ~370 nm up to few microns, and crystallographic textures. Low temperature processing of the AZ31B Mg alloy was successful after initial high temperature processing. Smaller grain sizes were achieved using the temperature step-down method leading to incremental reduction in grain size at each ECAE pass. The temperature step-down method was utilized to develop hybrid ECAE routes to obtain specific crystallographic textures. Optimized hybrid ECAE routes were developed which resulted in a high strength/high ductility material with the average grain size of ~370 nm. The ECAE processed alloy showed a high tensile yield strength of ~380 MPa that has never been reported so far in AZ31 ingot metallurgy Mg alloys.
The influence of grain size on the critical stress for the activation of individual deformation mechanisms was also investigated by systematically controlling the texture and grain size, and assuming the activation of mainly a single deformation mechanism through the careful selection of the loading direction on the processed samples. It was revealed that the Hall-Petch slope for the basal slip was much smaller than those of prismatic slip and tensile twinning.
