Experimental Study on the Elastic–plastic Transitions of the Hetero-structured High Pressure Die Casting Mg–Al-RE Alloy

Abstract

High pressure die casting (HPDC) Mg alloy has a hetero-structure in which the microstructures gradually coarsen from the casting surface to the interior, leading to the different elastic–plastic (E-P) transitional behaviors among the layers. In this paper, we quantitively determined the diverse E-P transitions among the HPDC layers and related them to the microstructural evolution. To investigate independently the E-P transitional behavior of the layer, the surface, middle, and central layers were deliberately sliced in sequence from the casting surface to the interior of the HPDC Mg-4Al-5.7RE (in wt.%) component. The onset and the end of E-P transition in each layer were quantitively determined by cyclic tensile test and Kocks-Mecking analysis, respectively. It was found that the plastic deformation for all layers occurred in the first unloading loop near zero strain, indicating the start of the E-P transition. With increasing strain, the E-P transition ended first in the middle layer at 0.0081 strain due to the lowest fraction of the second phases and ended last at the small-grained surface layer at 0.0090 strain. Excluding the twinning-dependent anelastic strain, the E-P transitions ended in advance at the strains of 0.0059 and 0.0062 in the middle and surface layer, respectively. A combination of cyclic tensile test and Kocks-Mecking analysis provided a method to quantitively determine the diverse E-P transitions among the HPDC layers resulted from the hetero-structure regarding grains, the second phases, and twins.