Effect of twinning and detwinning on inelastic behavior during unloading in a magnesium alloy sheet

We investigate the nonlinear response arising during unloading under in-plane uniaxial compression of a rolled magnesium alloy sheet using a crystal plasticity finite-element method, focusing on the effects of twinning and detwinning, and discuss the mechanism that causes the nonlinear response to be more pronounced under uniaxial compression than under uniaxial tension. In the simulation, we employed a twinning and detwinning model recently proposed by the authors. From numerical experiments, we confirmed that, as already noted in previous studies, detwinning activity plays an important role in the nonlinear response during unloading. However, we also found that the basal slip could become very active during unloading because of the dispersion of crystallographic orientations caused by twinning activity during loading, which is another factor in the pronounced nonlinear response during unloading under uniaxial compression. We conclude that the nonlinear response during unloading is more pronounced under uniaxial compression than under uniaxial tension because of these two factors—i.e., the detwinning activity and the pronounced basal slip activity—which are not present under uniaxial tension.