Improving Mechanical and Corrosion Behavior of 5052 Aluminum Alloy Processed by Cyclic Extrusion Compression

oleh: Jianxin Wu, Faramarz Djavanroodi, Mahmoud Shamsborhan, Shokouh Attarilar, Mahmoud Ebrahimi

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: MDPI AG 2022-07-01

Deskripsi

<b>Background</b> The severe plastic deformation approach and its well-known cyclic extrusion compression (CEC) method have been established as a powerful tool for fabricating bulk ultrafine-grained metals and alloys with improved properties. <b>Objective</b> This study focused on the microstructure evolution, hardness behavior, and corrosion properties of the CEC-processed Al5052 up to four passes compared to the initial annealed state. <b>Methods</b> The initial and CEC-processed Al5052 samples at different pass numbers were examined experimentally by EBSD analyses, hardness measurements, and corrosion resistance. <b>Results</b> Substantial grain refinement was attained from ~23 μm for the annealed sample to ~0.8 μm in the four passes sample. In addition, the hardness values considerably increased up to 75.7% after four passes from the initial value of 80 HV. In addition, the increment of pass numbers led to a more uniform dispersion of hardness values. Furthermore, the production of more stable protective oxide layers on the UFG structure of the CEC-processed sample led to the improvement in electrochemical response with a corrosion rate reduction from 1.49 to 1.02 mpy, respectively, in the annealed and final pass CEC-processed samples. In fact, the annealed sample manifested more large-sized and deeper pits than the CECed samples due to the increment of potential values and electrochemical attack of chlorine ions that finally deteriorates the corrosion performance. <b>Conclusions</b> CEC is an efficient method to improve the mechanical properties of materials due to substantial microstructural changes along with enhancement of electrochemical behavior because of the presence of small-sized and shallow pits.