Elevated Temperature Effects on the Plastic Anisotropy of an Extruded Mg-4 Wt Pct Li Alloy: Experiments and Polycrystal Modeling

In this work, we study the deformation behavior of Mg-4 wt pct Li in uniaxial tension as a function of temperature and loading direction. Standard tensile tests were performed at temperatures in the range of 293 K (20 °C) ≤ T ≤ 473 K (200 °C) and in two in-plane directions: the extrusion and the transverse. We find that while the in-plane plastic anisotropy (PA) decreases with temperature, the anisotropy in failure strain and texture development increases. To uncover the temperature dependence in the critical stresses for slip and in the amounts of slip and twinning systems mediating deformation, we employ the elastic-plastic self-consistent polycrystal plasticity model with a thermally activated dislocation density based hardening law for activating slip with individual crystals. We demonstrate that the model, with a single set of intrinsic material parameters, achieves good agreement with the stress–strain curves, deformation textures, and intragranular misorientation axis analysis for all test directions and temperatures. With the model, we show that at all temperatures the in-plane tensile behavior is driven primarily by \( \left\langle a \right\rangle \) slip and both \( \left\langle {c + a} \right\rangle \) slip and twinning play a minor role. The analysis explains that the in-plane PA decreases and failure strains increase with temperature as a result of a significant reduction in the activation stress for pyramidal \( \left\langle {c + a} \right\rangle \) slip, which effectively promotes strain accommodation from multiple types of \( \left\langle a \right\rangle \) and \( \left\langle {c + a} \right\rangle \) slip. The results also show that because of the strong initial texture, in-plane texture development is anisotropic since prismatic slip dominates the deformation in one test, although it is not the easiest slip mode, and basal slip in the other. These findings reveal the relationship between the temperature-sensitive thresholds needed to activate crystallographic slip and the development of texture and macroscopic PA.