Severe plastic deformation (SPD) has been used over the past few decades for producing submicron grain (SMG) structures in range of metals and alloys. Equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) is a useful process for producing these types of structures whereby the material is deformed to very high plastic strains by passing a billet several times through the ECAP die. This process has an added advantage maintaining the initial dimensions of the billet. SMG materials produced by ECAP and related routes are useful as they usually exhibit excellent properties including high strength and hardness, and excellent superplastic formability: these and other properties make SMG materials useful for industrial and aerospace applications. In this thesis, a binary aluminium alloy containing a very low concentration of scandium (0.1 wt. %) Sc alloy was investigated and compared with higher Sc-containing alloys. The material was deformed by ECAP in the solution treated condition to an equivalent von Mises strain of 9.2 then pre-aged at 250 0C to generate a submicron grained material containing a relatively uniform dispersion of nanosized Al3Sc dispersiods. The thermal stability of this pre-aged microstructure was investigated by annealing at temperatures up to 450 0C resulted in continuous grain coarsening by the process of continuous recrystallization whereby the initial microstructure evolves gradually with no marked change in the grain size distribution, texture and grain boundary character. However, extended annealing (> 1h) at 4500 C resulted in discontinuous grain coarsening (often termed recrystallization) whereby a few grains grow rapidly to eventually produce a coarse-grained final microstructure. Throughout annealing, there was a good correlation between the dispersion parameter, (f/d) where f and d is the volume fraction and the mean diameter of Al3Sc particles in the alloy, respectively, and both the mean grain size (D ) and D /D max where max D is the maximum grain diameter observed in the microstructure. The grain structure was found to undergo moderate coarsening at the high f/d-values but converted to a coarsegrained structure for f/d ~<0.5/μm, and this change occurred when the mean grain diameter was ~ 3-4μm. Hence, the critical value of the dispersion parameter for the transition from continuous to discontinuous coarsening falls between the theoretical value for submicron grain size alloys (f/d ~ 1.5/μm) and the value found for conventionally-deformed alloys (f/d ~ 0.1/μm). This behaviour is the result of the alloy no longer being ultra-fine grained at the onset of discontinuous coarsening.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/257808 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Bommareddy, Aravinda Reddy, Materials Science & Engineering, Faculty of Science, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Materials Science & Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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