Hot Deformation Behavior of Homogenized Mg-13.5Gd-3.2Y-2.3Zn-0.5Zr Alloy via Hot Compression Tests

Mg-Gd-Y-Zn-Zr Mg alloys show excellent performance in high-end manufacturing due to its strength, hardness and corrosion resistance. However, the hot deformation and dynamic recrystallization (DRX) behaviors of Mg-13.5Gd-3.2Y-2.3Zn-0.5Zr were not studied. For this article, hot compression behavior of homogenized high rare-earth (RE) content Mg-13.5Gd-3.2Y-2.3Zn-0.5Zr (wt%) alloy was investigated by using the Gleeble-3500D thermo-simulation test machine under the temperature of 350–500 °C and the strain rate of 0.001–1 s(−1). It was found that the high flow stress corresponded to the low temperature and high strain rate, which showed DRX steady state curve during the hot compression. The hot deformation average activation was 263.17 kJ/mol, which was obtained by the analysis of the hyperbolic constitutive equation and the Zener-Hollomon parameter. From observation of the microstructure, it was found that kink deformation of long period stacking ordered (LPSO) phase was one of the important coordination mechanisms of hot deformation at low temperature. The processing map with the strain of 0.5 was established under the basis of dynamic material model (DMM); it described two high power dissipation domains: one appearing in the temperature range of 370–440 °C and the strain rate range of 0.001–0.006 s(−1), the other appearing in the temperature range of 465–500 °C and strain rate range of 0.001–0.05 s(−1), in which dynamic recrystallization (DRX) mainly ocurred. The highest degree of DRX was 18% from the observation of the metallographic.