Research of electroplastic rolling of AZ31 Mg alloy strip

Abstract The present study first reported an application of electroplastic rolling (ER) of AZ31 Mg alloy strip, and conventional rolling process was compared as well. The results indicated that the AZ31 strip produced by ER technique yields lower resistance to deformation and obtains better toughness, which implies possibility to reduce annealing numbers in the case of rolling of thin Mg alloy strip. The obvious dynamic recrystallization (DRX) occurs as the characteristics of the microstructure at a relatively low temperature in the case of ER compared with conventional hot rolling process, which can be attributed to the coupled actions of the thermal and athermal effects resulting from electropulsing. And it has been found that there are different mechanisms of deformation during ER process, where sliding mechanism of fine grain boundaries plays an important role to harmonize coarse grain deformation consisting of slip and twinning of dislocations to improve the ductility of AZ31 Mg alloy.