Cyclic Plastic Deformation, Fatigue, and the Associated Micro-Mechanisms in Magnesium: From Single Crystal to Polycrystal

Magnesium and its alloys have received substantial interests as the government initiatives on energy saving and environment protection demand an increasing use of lightweight materials in structural parts, especially in transportation industries. A good understanding of fatigue behavior in magnesium is critical to ensure the reliability and durability of the magnesium components. Unlike the body centered cubic and face centered cubic metals, fundamental knowledge concerning the cyclic deformation and fatigue in hexagonal close packed magnesium is limited. The current research aims at a better understanding of the micro-mechanisms associated with the cyclic deformation and fatigue of magnesium. Magnesium single crystal was chosen to study the fundamental twinning/detwinning process while extruded polycrystalline pure magnesium was studied for the fatigue damage mechanisms.;Cyclic deformation and the corresponding morphology evolution of {1 0 1¯ 2} twinning--detwinning--retwinning are, for the first time, characterized in magnesium single crystal under fully reserved strain-controlled tension-compression utilizing in situ optical microscopy. As loading cycles are increased, the activity of twinning--detwinning--retwinning gradually decreases. Microscopy after fatigue shows that the matrix region having experienced repeated twinning-detwinning cannot be completely detwinned to its original crystal orientation. Fragmented secondary tension twins are found to result from twin-twin interactions. Various twin-twin interaction structures exist in fatigued magnesium single crystal: quilted-looking twin structure, "apparent crossing" twin structure, and double tension twin structure. According to the crystallography of magnesium, twin-twin interactions are classified into Type I for two twin variants sharing the same zone axis and Type II for two twins with different zone axes. For Type I twin-twin interactions, one twin does not transmit across the twin boundary and into the other twin. For Type II twin--twin interactions, one twin can transmit into the other only under some special loading conditions. In most cases, twin transmission does not occur but, instead, twin-twin boundaries form that contain boundary dislocations.;The formation mechanism of the twin-twin boundary is proposed based on the reaction of twinning dislocations. Twin-twin boundary is a low-angle tilt boundary for Type I co-zone twin-twin interaction whereas it adopts a high-index crystallographic plane for Type II twin-twin interaction according to a geometry analysis. Twin-twin boundary dislocations can be inferred by reactions of twinning dislocations associated with the two twin variants. An "apparent crossing" twin structure is a consequence of twin-twin boundary formation. Under reversed loading subsequent to twinning, detwinning is retarded and secondary twinning can be activated at the twin-twin boundary for Type II twin-twin interaction.;The fatigue damage mechanisms in magnesium were studied in extruded coarse-grained polycrystalline pure magnesium through fully-reversed strain controlled tension-compression along its extrusion direction. Twinning/detwinning dominates the cyclic deformation at high strain amplitudes while dislocation slips are responsible for the cyclic deformation at low strain amplitudes. Microcrack initiation and early-stage crack growth strongly depend on cyclic loading magnitude. During most of fatigue life at twinning-dominated strain amplitudes, microcracks are incessantly initiated with limited propagation on both grain boundary and twin boundary. At slip-dominated strain amplitudes, microcracks are initiated predominantly by grain boundary cracking. Both intergranular and transgranular modes are observed for early-stage crack propagation. Early-stage transgranular propagation is dominated by cracking at twin boundaries at twinning-dominated strain amplitudes. At dislocation slip-dominated strain amplitudes, early-stage transgranular propagation is found to occur on the {1¯ 2 1¯ 0} crystal planes, which is driven by alternative slip mechanism on two sets of second-order pyramidal slip system.