Enhanced strength and ductility of wrought magnesium alloys through alloying with rare earth elements

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The challenges of today's advanced world are enforcing a strong demand for light alloys based for e.g. on magnesium to be used in transportation. Despite many attractive properties the applications of wrought magnesium alloys is still limited due to insufficient low temperature formability, which is directly attributed to an inadequate texture and microstructure development during thermomechanical processing. By contrast to typical wrought Mg alloys (e.g. AZ31, ZK60) which develop sharp deformation textures associated with strong mechanical anisotropy, rare earth (RE)-containing Mg alloys develop much weaker and less common textures that contribute to the enhancement of ambient formability and the reduction of the mechanical anisotropy. Although the effect of RE additions on randomizing the texture has been reported, the mechanisms of the observed texture modification are still not conclusively understood. The objective of this project is to conduct comprehensive investigations of deformation and recrystallization of Mg-RE alloys that will shed a new light on design strategies of Mg wrought alloys with optimized strength and ductility. The main focus is set on investigating single RE additions and exploiting their influence on the deformation characteristics, the recrystallization mechanisms, and the corresponding texture development. By identifying the controlling mechanisms, we should be able to derive a concept for microstructure and texture engineering for optimized mechanical properties.