Designing a magnesium alloy with high strength and high formability

Abstract

Although magnesium alloys, as the lightest structural alloys, offer significant potential for automotive applications, their applications remain limited due to their poor formability at room temperature. Since the strategies used for improving formability usually result in a degradation of strength, there are no high strength magnesium alloys showing good formability. Here we report an alloy design concept that can simultaneously provide high strength and good formability. Such designed alloy when subjected to an appropriate processing technique shows a combination of strength and formability that surpasses those of the existing magnesium alloys reported so far. The alloy design concept used in the present study is based on the utilization of alloying elements that can induce precipitation, as well as maximize the segregation of other texture-controlling alloying elements. Such developed alloy is expected to broaden the application of Mg alloy sheets, which are now starting to gain acceptance by automotive industries.

Ca-induced Plasticity in Magnesium Alloy: EBSD Measurements and VPSC Calculations

“…The higher activity of prismatic slip systems is mainly related to the Ca addition, which led to the formation of (Mg,Al) 2 Ca particles, as shown by the EPMA maps in Figure 1e. During the primary processing of the Ca-added Mg alloy, these particles can weaken the basal texture through inducing the recrystallization [22,23]. Accordingly, one way to explain the high activity of the prismatic slip is the particle-induced basal texture weakening, where in such a texture, a higher amount of stress can be resolved in the prismatic plane when comparing with strong basal-textured Mg, leading to the high activity of the prismatic slip.…”

Hierarchical Twinning Induced Texture Weakening in Lean Magnesium Alloys

“…This is owing to the fact that twinning can either give rise to regions of severe shear incompatibility near the twin-parent interface (such as for compression twins) or generate crystallographically hard orientations (in case of extension twins) that adversely affect the overall elongation response (Aydiner et al, 2009;Molodov et al, 2014Molodov et al, , 2017Basu and Al-Samman, 2015). In this regard, promoting twin formation is often avoided when it comes to designing ductile Mg alloys, resulting in employing alternative routes such as designing fine-grained microstructures thereby abating twinning activity and increasing slip contribution (Yamashita et al, 2001;Hofstetter et al, 2015;Lin et al, 2016;Trang et al, 2018).…”

Introductory Chapter: An Insight into Fascinating Potential of Magnesium

“…Hence, they are predominantly being used in the automobile sector as sheets or even engine blocks and other automobile components such as in steering wheels, boot area, etc. Further, for robust and elevated temperature applications such as engine blocks, newly developed highstrength magnesium alloys and alloy nanocomposites can be used as they demonstrate good thermal and dimensional stabilities [7][8][9][10][11].…”