Abstract
Magnesium and its alloys attract increasingly wide attention in various fields, ranging from transport to medical solutions, due to their outstanding structural and degradation properties. These properties can be tailored through alloying and thermo-mechanical processing, which is often complex and multi-step, thus requiring in-depth analysis. In this work, we demonstrate the capability of synchrotron-based nanotomographic X-ray imaging methods, namely holotomography and transmission X-ray microscopy, for the quantitative 3D analysis of the evolution of intermetallic precipitate (particle) morphology and distribution in magnesium alloy Mg–5.78Zn–0.44Zr subjected to a complex multi-step processing. A rich history of variation of the intermetallic particle structure in the processed alloy provided a testbed for challenging the analytical capabilities of the imaging modalities studied. The main features of the evolving precipitate structure revealed earlier by traditional light and electron microscopy methods were confirmed by the 3D techniques of synchrotron-based X-ray imaging. We further demonstrated that synchrotron-based X-ray imaging enabled uncovering finer details of the variation of particle morphology and number density at various stages of processing—above and beyond the information provided by visible light and electron microscopy.
Highlights
Magnesium and its alloys attract increasingly wide attention in various fields, ranging from transport to medical solutions, due to their outstanding structural and degradation properties
The streak artefacts in holotomography images are due to absorption, which is more prominent for low energies
The fringes arise from the fact that strong phase gradients are not compatible with the assumptions made for linearized phase retrieval
Summary
Magnesium and its alloys attract increasingly wide attention in various fields, ranging from transport to medical solutions, due to their outstanding structural and degradation properties. It was found that agglomerated colonies of primary Mg–Zn and Zn–Zr intermetallic particles (e.g. M gZn2, Mg4Zn7 and Zr2Zn3) at grain boundaries and in proximity to triple junctions in the initial material condition break up, redistribute and most likely re-solutionise at the intermediate stage of processing, i.e. during the direct extrusion step[18] Secondary precipitates such as basal platelets and c-axis rods appeared significantly finer than those typically observed in alloys of the Mg–Zn system after static ageing[17]. Zn–Zr intermetallics occurred primarily along plastic flux lines throughout the microstructure These reports have established an excellent basis for the correlative analysis of the potential of X-ray imaging in the study of precipitate structure evolution in Mg alloys
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