Investigation of the hot compression behavior of the Mg–9Al–1Zn alloy using EBSP analysis and a cellular automata simulation

In this paper, the flow behavior of the magnesium alloy AZ91 during hot compression with dynamic recrystallization (DRX) is studied by the electron back-scattered diffraction pattern (EBSP) method and a two-dimensional cellular automata (CA) simulation. The flow behavior characteristics of the alloy during compression are studied and analyzed in detail. The influence of second phase particles on the accumulation of dislocation and the migration of grain boundaries during the compression process are taken into account in the CA model. The current CA simulation results agree well with the experimental data in terms of both flow stress and microstructure evolution, suggesting that the proposed CA model is a reliable numerical approach for studying the DRX process of the AZ91 alloy. The simulated results show that the average size of the recrystallized grains increases to a peak value and then slowly reduces to a steady value due to simultaneous multi-cycle recrystallization during hot compression of the AZ91 alloy.