Microstructural Evolution and Structure-Hardness Relationship in an Al-4wt.%Mg Alloy Processed by High-Pressure Torsion

Coarse-grained Al-4wt.%Mg alloy with high stacking fault energy was deformed by high-pressure torsion (HPT) at room temperature. The HPT-induced grain refinement process of the alloy can be clarified as follows: (1) the randomly distributed dislocations firstly interact and rearrange to form dislocation cells; (2) with increasing the strain, these cell boundaries transform to small-angle grain boundaries that act as the dislocation sources, and therefore Shockley partial dislocations on the glide plane (111) can be easily emitted to accommodate plastic deformation; (3) along with the partial dislocations emission from low angle grain boundaries, the low angle grain boundaries gradually transform into the high angle grain boundaries. The relationship between the microstructural evolution and hardness was also investigated. It has been shown that the relationship between grain size and hardness deviates from the Hall-Petch linear relationship.