2006 Volume 47 Issue 10 Pages 2504-2511
In this study, Al-2.5Mg alloy was prepared with different cold rolling reductions, and then friction stir processing (FSP) was performed to investigate the effect of prior microstructure variations on friction stirred materials. The experimental results indicate that the FSP specimens not only had better tensile properties but also better vibration fracture resistance, which would be expected from the microstructural refinement which resulted from the phenomenon of dynamic recrystallization. The stress-elongation curves of all specimens showed the serrated yielding. The higher grain boundary introduced by FSP could hold the mobile dislocations long enough to let Mg atoms form atmospheres around them. Consequently, the effect serration magnitude was more significant on the specimens which were given FSP. This can be ascribed to the grain refinement and the resulting increase of the boundaries which is the main source of obstacles. In addition, the vibration fracture resistance of the FSP specimens shows that the duration of stage I decreases with increasing the prior deformation rate before FSP.
Meanwhile, the prior deformation samples possessed better vibration fracture resistance under the same initial deflection amplitude (6.5 mm). Based on the observed microstructures, this can be attributed to a large number of retained dislocation tangles introduced by prior cold rolling, even after FSP, which improved the crack propagation resistance and reduced the crack propagation rate. The experimental results confirmed that vibration fracture resistance can be quantitatively correlated with the crack tortuosity value which corresponds to the crack propagation behavior.
