| Summary: | Magnesium alloys have a great potential in automotive industries, compared to steel and aluminium (Al), Magnesium (Mg) is much lighter and this weight reduction improves fuel efficiency and lowers green gas emission. Due to its hexagonal crystal structure, magnesium has poor ductility at room temperature. Magnesium's ductility improves significantly above about 200°C due to thermal activation of additional slip systems. This has lead to efforts to form auto-body panels with commercial AZ31 magnesium sheet at elevated temperatures. In this work, various AZ31 magnesium alloy materials were used to investigate the influence of deformation conditions on texture and microstructure. Moreover, it is to define the correlation between formability and different deformation mechanisms. === It was observed that only basal slip and twinning contributed to room temperature deformation. As deformation temperature increased, an increase in ductility in Mg contributed to dynamic recrystallization occurring readily at elevated temperatures (≥300°C). Even coarse grain material experienced significant tensile elongation due grain refinement. Depending on temperature and strain rate, different deformation mechanisms were activated and lead to different failure modes (moderate necking, cavity, strong necking). More specifically, deformation at elevated temperature in the low-strain-rate regime with stress exponent n about 2-3 and activation energy close to grain-boundary diffusion of Mg (Q = 92 kJ/mol) is characteristic of GBS. Deformation at elevated temperature in the high strain rate regime showed that the stress exponent increased to a value close to 5 and that the activation energy was consistent with the one for Mg self-diffusion (135 kJ/mol) and for diffusion of Al in Mg (143 kJ/mol). This was indicative of a dislocation creep deformation mechanism. Plus the six-fold symmetric patterns of the {1 100} and {1120} pole figures and the splitting of basal plane distribution are another indication of slip mechanism or of dislocation creep mechanism. === The optimum deformation behavior for AZ31 sheet was found to be for the material with fine grain microstructure. The highest elongation of 265% was obtained with the material having initial grain size of 8 mum. In addition, strain-rate sensitivity, which is a good indication of material's ductility, also was the highest in material with 8 mum grain size. As a common trend, the strain-rate sensitivity increased with decreasing strain rate, increasing temperature and decreasing grain size. === In terms of drawability of AZ31 sheet, the deformation controlled by GBS resulted in a fair drawability/formability property with r-value about 1 whereas a deformation mechanism controlled by dislocation creep showed a good drawability with r-value above 1.5. Due to activation of additional slip systems (non-basal <a> and <c+a>), the thinning of the sheet was prevented, in particular at deformation conditions of 450°C with 0.1s-1 where r-value was highest. This deformation condition might suggest good forming process parameters, especially for deep drawing, for the commercial AZ31 sheet under investigation. A preliminary study of Forming Limit Diagram for AZ31 sheet was performed by the Limit Dome Height test method at 300°C. The FLD0 of AZ31 was found to be 67%; the part depth of biaxial forming was 1.86 in; and the maximum LDH varied from 2.4 to 2.6 in.
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