Al-Mg alloys exhibit remarkable hot and warm ductilities, which have made the 5000-series alloys a critical part of commercial hot forming operations for the transportation industry. This presentation will review the metallurgical and practical engineering reasons for this success and will reveal new discoveries of behaviors in these materials which are expected to impact future advances in hot- and warm-forming. The excellent formabilities in this material class are fundamentally attributable to two deformation mechanisms, grain-boundary-sliding and solute-drag creep. However, a number of failure mechanisms ultimately limit final ductility and formability. These include cavitation, flow localization, microstructure evolution and material rupture. The interplay of these mechanisms will be discussed, and new discoveries regarding microstructure evolution during forming, which have ramifications on potential future processing windows, will be presented.
<< back