Study on the compressive deformation behavior of a basal textured AZ31 magnesium alloy from the perspective of local strain

For basal textured magnesium alloy subjecting to in-plane compression, the deformation is complicated since twinning, dislocation slipping and their intersecting are involved. In this work, a high-resolution digital image correlation (HR-DIC) technique combined with electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) was used to quantitatively study the deformation behavior of AZ31 alloy in in-plane compression. Grain-scale local strain characteristics were emphasized. It is found that the local strain in the twined region is homogeneous and will not continuously increase with the applied nominal compression strain if no dislocation slipping is activated. When twinning is accompanied by dislocation slipping in the deformation of magnesium alloys, which is actually the common case, the strain contribution by the twinning can be calculated by transferring its shear from the twin frame to the sample frame. The results of this work can be beneficial for further understanding of deformation mechanism of magnesium alloy and the development of physics-based simulation models.