Achieving high strength and high ductility in magnesium alloy using hard-plate rolling (HPR) process

Magnesium alloys are highly desirable for a wide range of lightweight structural components. However, rolling Mg alloys can be difficult due to their poor plasticity and the strong texture yielded from rolling often results in poor plate forming ability, which limits their further engineering applications. Here we report a new hard-plate rolling (HPR) route which achieves a large reduction during a single rolling pass. The Mg-9Al-1Zn (AZ91) plates processed by HPR consist of coarse grains of 30–60 μm, exhibiting a typical basal texture, fine grains of 1–5 μm and ultrafine (sub) grains of 200–500 nm, both of the latter two having a weakened texture. More importantly, the HPR was efficient in gaining a simultaneous high strength and uniform ductility, i.e., ~371 MPa and ~23%, respectively. The superior properties should be mainly attributed to the cooperation effect of the multimodal grain structure and weakened texture, where the former facilitates a strong work hardening while the latter promotes the basal slip. The HPR methodology is facile and effective and can avoid plate cracking that is prone to occur during conventional rolling processes. This strategy is applicable to hard-to-deform materials like Mg alloys and thus has a promising prospect for industrial application.