Effect of Mn on fracture toughness in Mg–6Al–1 wt.%Zn alloy.pdfVIP

Materials Science and Engineering A 479 (2008) 117–124 Effect of Mn on fracture toughness in Mg–6Al–1 wt.%Zn alloy Taisuke Sasaki ∗, Y. Takigawa, K. Higashi Department of Materials Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka Prefecture University, 1-1 Gakuen-cho, Sakai 599-8531, Japan Received 28 December 2006; received in revised form 11 June 2007; accepted 15 June 2007 Abstract The effect of Mn content on fracture toughness and strength is investigated in Mg–6 wt.%Al–1 wt.%Zn alloy. As a result, the addition of 0.1–0.15 wt.% of manganese, which is close to the solubility limit of manganese is the most effective to avoid a significant reduction of fracture toughness and takes advantage of solution strengthening at the same time. The addition of Mn above the solubility resulted in the reduction of fracture toughness due to the formation of Mn-bearing particles. We defined the minimum size of void-nucleating particles and found that this minimum size increased with decreasing fracture toughness due to the formation of Mn–Al particles by the excessive manganese addition. In such a case, the reduction of the size of the second-phase particles is effective in improving the fracture toughness. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Magnesium alloy; Strength; Fracture toughness; Manganese content; Second-phase particle; Minimum size 1. Introduction the unique microstructure–fracture relationships such as that between the grain size, texture and fracture toughness [8–13]. Due to the strong demand for weight reduction in vehicles