Abstract

An ultra-fine grain (UFG) material exhibits a high strength without the degradation of toughness. Constrained groove pressing (CGP) is one of the severe plastic deformation techniques, which will be used to produce ultra-fine grained microstructures. The silicon series alloy of aluminum 6061 (AA6061), having larger grain size, is subjected to severe plastic deformation using CGP technique. The ultimate tensile strength and hardness of severely plastically deformed specimens were determined. In addition, thermal stability of the severely deformed microstructure was evaluated by exposing to temperature of 125 °C at exposure duration of 25, 50, 75, 100 and 125 minutes. The CGPed A6061 samples exhibited superior mechanical properties owing to its refined UFG microstructure. Results of annealed samples showed that the tensile strength and micro-hardness of CGPed was still higher than the unprocessed samples, demonstrating the reasonable thermal stability of CGPed AA 6061 samples. It is presumably due to the existence of extensive trident grain boundaries and obstruction of grain boundary movement due to pinning effect caused by dispersed precipitate phases in UFG.

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