Investigation on the effect of friction stir processing on the superplastic forming

Superplastic forming has now become conventional for forming complex parts from sheet metals. In many superplastically formed aerospace components, only a selective region undergoes superplastic forming. In those cases, instead of selecting a material exhibiting superplastic properties, a light weight and low cost material can be chosen and its microstructure can be modified locally by the Friction Stir Processing (FSP) technique. In this work, AZ31B magnesium alloy is chosen, and friction stir processing is performed by varying the process parameters, such as tool axial force, tool traversing speed and tool rotational speed. The process parameter that produced equiaxed grains in the stirred zone with a grain size less than 10 μm is selected. With this parameter, single pass FSP, multiple pass FSP without overlapping and multiple pass FSP with overlapping are performed on the AZ31B magnesium alloy sheets and their superplastic behaviour was examined. Also the theoretical modelling was carried out to determine the strain rate sensitivity for the friction stir processed AZ31B magnesium alloy and for the nonprocessed AZ31B magnesium alloy. It is found that the strain rate sensitivity for the friction stir processed component has increased, when compared to the base metal.