Study Of Thermo-electropulsing Rolling Process On AZ31Magnesium Alloy Strips

Thermo-electropulsing rolling (TER) processing, which integrated theelectropulsing treatment with the conventional warm rolling (WR) processing, wasapplied to manufacture AZ31magnesium (Mg) alloy strips in the current study.Influences of TER processing on microstructure and mechanical properties of AZ31Mgalloy were studied and compared with those of cold rolling and WR processing.It was found that TER processing may induce and accelerate the dynamicrecrystallization (DRX) behavior of the samples at a relatively low temperature within ashort time, and resulted in obtaining the equiaxed recrystallized grains with finemicrostructure. The carefully designed deformation with multi-pass TER process maylead to desirable grain refinement. The outcomes also indicated that the athermal effectsof electropulsing tended to activate cross-slip of dislocation on non-basal planes, andaccelerate the movement of the dislocation climb and the diffusion of the vacancy.Moreover, some relevant results in this work indicate that TER processing is one of themost efficient methods for improving both strength and plasticity of Mg alloys and TERprocessing could lead to much better mechanical properties of the samples compared toWR one. Multi-pass TER processing was inclined to obtain more homogeneousmicrostructures of the Mg alloys.Hence, it was believed that TER process may become a facile and highly efficientmethod (i.e. less energy and time consumption) to product AZ31Mg alloy strips orsheets with outstanding performance and excellent surface quality.