The Evolution of Microstructure and Texture during Thermomechanical Processing of Al-Mg-Si-Cu Alloy

Abstract

In order to improve formability, it is practicable to control the texture through adjusting process parameters. This work describes the evolution of microstructure and texture during thermomechanical processing of Al-Mg-Si-Cu alloy. With the change of deformation conditions, both the microstructure and texture change dramatically. After hot rolling from 90 mm to 7.5 mm, H and E texture components in the surface layer become dominant due to non-uniform deformation. And then with the increasing of cold rolling deformation from 7.5 mm to 4.0 mm, the texture components gradually change from shear texture to typical fcc texture, i.e. Copper, S and Brass textures, and their intensities also increase. And these texture components transform to some uncommon texture components after intermediate annealing, including {013}<001>, {001}<130>, Goss texture, {556}<110> and {111}<110> texture, not as the typical recrystallization texture components. Continually giving a cold rolling deformation from 4.0 mm to 1.0 mm, not only Copper, S, Brass textures, but also Goss texture due to the lower deformation can be found in the alloy sheet. The high temperature solid solution treatment can result in the complete recrystallization and the formation of recrystallization texture, Cube, Goss and R texture, which results in the high formability of experimental alloy.