Press Formability Of AZ31 Magnesium Alloy Sheets Produced By Equal Channel Angular Rolling

Abstract

I well known that magnesium alloys sheet exhibits very limited press formability at ambient temperatures using conventional forming operations such as symmetric rolling [13]. However, it is also known that magnesium alloys can be extremely ductile at room temperature by controlled texture through equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE), which exhibits a low yield stress and a large work hardening exponent. Iwanaga et al [4] have also reported that the limiting drawing ratio (LDR) can be improve from 1.2 to 1.4 at room temperature by reduction of (0002) basal plane texture. Therefore it is implied that by controlling the texture magnesium alloys possess some press formability at room temperature. The strong (0002) basal plane texture is induced by symmetric rolling because of the deformation mechanism in magnesium alloys and the rolling deformation character [5,6]. Recently it has been reported that the (0002) basal plane texture can be reduced by the shear deformation of asymmetric rolling which leads to an improvement of ductility [7]. However, the reduction of (0002) basal plane texture is limited. Although the texture of magnesium alloys can be controlled effectively by the ECAE process [8,9] it is difficult to fabricate sheets with ECAE. Recently several continuous shear deformation processes, such as Conshearing [10,11] and C2S2 [12,13], have been proposed to produce