Work

Investigation of shear bands induced nucleation and recrystallisation behaviour in a rare earth containing magnesium alloy

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Annealing is widely applied to the deformed magnesium alloys to tailor crystallographic texture and improve formability, tremendous efforts were taken to understand recrystallisation nucleation and grain growth. Nevertheless, it is still a highly debated field, attributes to the lack of large area in-situ microstructure datasets and effective data processing approach, especially the grains tracking strategy. In this work, the recrystallisation process of a Mg-2.4Zn-0.2Ce wt.% alloy is systematically investigated with quasi-in-situ electron backscatter diffraction method to unravel the role of shear bands during recrystallisation annealing. A newly developed toolbox Track-Rex is adopted, allowing us to automatically track 40900 grains within 10 minutes. The results show that shear bands were the preferential nucleation sites at early stage of annealing. However, with increased annealing time, the preferred nucleation sites shifted to the deformed grain boundaries, and the grains nucleated from shear bands were progressively consumed. Thus, the contribution of shear bands induced nucleation to the recrystallised texture is considerably reduced, from up to 51.2% of area fraction in the early stage towards 20.89% in the final annealing stage. In terms of texture evolution, all the recrystallised grains exhibit a scattered off-basal feature regardless to the nucleation sites. Additionally, the basal orientated grains were gradually consumed while off-basal grains had a higher possibility to retained. More specifically, within shear bands induced nucleation, recrystallised grains with low angle grain boundaries were easily consumed, while other grains exhibiting high angle grain boundaries were more likely to maintain along the recrystallisation procedure.

Source: Materials Characterization

DOI: 10.1016/j.matchar.2025.114809

Authors: Haoran Yi, Hua Li, Xun Zeng, Haiming Liu, Dikai Guan

Institutions: University of Southampton, Northeastern University

Language: English

Topic: Magnesium Alloys: Properties and Applications

Subfield: Biomaterials

Field: Materials Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,320

Funder: UK Research and Innovation