Plane-strain forging of wrought magnesium alloy AZ31

Finite element (FE) simulation was used to evaluate plane-strain forging of a magnesium alloy, AZ31, at temperatures of 200, 250 and 300 °C. A commercially available finite element package, ANSYS/LSDYNA, was used in the finite element analysis (FEA). From the simulation, forging load and strain distribution were computed and determined. Forging experiments were carried out on a rectangular billet, of dimension, 100 mm in length by 20 mm in width by 5 mm in thickness. It was found that the simulation results of forging load required were in good agreement with the empirical results. In this study, microstructural analysis for the part forged at 250 °C was also conducted and it was observed that the strain distribution diagram generated by FEA could generally predict the microstructure evolution. The size of the grains were very much strain-dependent where areas of high strain were observed to have small-refined grains while areas of low strain had unrefined grains or comparatively larger grain sizes.