Significant enhancement of bond strength in the accumulative roll bonding process using nano-sized SiO2 particles

doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2009.01.003

Journal of Materials Processing Technology

Volume 209, Issue 10, 1 June 2009, Pages 4830-4834

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2009.01.003 Get rights and content

Abstract

Accumulative roll bonding (ARB) is one of the most promising methods for the industrial production of ultrafine grained (UFG) sheet materials. The poor bond strength is one of the major drawbacks in the ARB process. Degreasing and wire-brushing have been widely adopted in ARB to improve bonding. In this paper, the nano-sized SiO₂ particles has been used to enhance the bond strength. The bond strength in our samples exceeds 2.5 times the values achieved by degreasing and wire-brushing methods. In addition, the mechanical properties and microstructures of the ARB-processed samples have also been investigated.

Introduction

Ultrafine grained (UFG) materials are defined as polycrystals having very small grains with an average grain size in the range of 100 nm to 1 μm (Valiev and Langdon, 2006). Compared with conventional materials, UFG materials show some excellent properties without the need to change the chemical composition. These properties include ultrahigh strength, low temperature and/or high strain rate superplasticity, enhanced fatigue behaviour and superior corrosion. For these reasons, UFG materials have attracted significant interest in recent years. Severe plastic deformation (SPD) is an extremely effective process for producing bulk UFG materials. Several SPD processing techniques have been developed to obtain UFG structures in both bulk and sheet materials, such as equal-channel angular pressing (ECAP) (Valiev et al., 1991), high-pressure torsion (HPT) (Smirnova et al., 1986), multi-axial compression/forging (MAC/F) (Salishchev et al., 1993) and accumulative roll bonding (ARB) (Saito et al., 1998).

As pointed out by Saito et al. (1998), the ECAP, HPT and MAC/F processes have two main drawbacks. First, forming machines with large load capacities and expensive dies are necessary for these processes. Second, productivity is relatively low and the amount of material produced is very limited. These processes are thought to be inappropriate for practical application of the most commonly used product – sheet. Though some improvements have been proposed (J.C. Lee et al., 2002, Raab et al., 2004) at present the above drawbacks have not been overcome. In 1998, Saito et al. (1998) invented a process, named accumulative roll bonding, to impose severe plastic strain to metallic materials by the rolling process. ARB is one of the most promising methods for the industrial production of UFG sheet materials. A schematic illustration of the ARB process is shown in Fig. 1. Two layers of the original sheet are stacked to form a thick specimen. In order to obtain one-body solid material, the rolling employed in the ARB is not only a deformation process but also a bonding process (roll bonding). To achieve good bonding, the sheet surfaces are subjected to surface treatments, such as degreasing and wire-brushing, before stacking. The two layers of material are joined together by rolling. The length of rolled material is then sectioned into two halves. The sectioned sheets are again surface-treated, stacked and roll-bonded.

Recently, much attention has been focused on the development of ultrafine grained materials in the form of sheet via the ARB process because of its potential cost-effectiveness in terms of commercial production, compared to other SPD processes. Tsuji and co-workers have applied the ARB process to obtain the ultrafine grained structure in various kinds of materials, such as aluminium alloys (Saito et al., 1999, Tsuji et al., 2003) and steels (Kamikawa et al., 2004, Tsuji et al., 2002). A sheet of 1100 commercial purity aluminium was rolled in six cycles (Tsuji et al., 2003), reducing the grain size to 200 nm in thickness and 1100 nm in length from an original equiaxed grain size of 18 μm. The tensile strength was increased to 3.7 times that of the original sheet. Tsuji et al. (2002) proved that most boundaries of the ultrafine grains in the ARB-processed materials are high-angle boundaries, which are important in order to achieve enhanced properties. ARB has also been used to produce multilayered composites (Chen et al., 2006). Kitazono et al. (2004) has used two A1050 aluminium and strips and TiH₂ powder to manufacture the closed-cell aluminium foams with about 40% porosity by ARB. Krallics and Lenard (2004) have conducted ARB of ultra-low-carbon steel strips. They have examined the bond strength and monitored significant edge cracking. The texture evolution throughout the ARB process has also been studied (S.H. Lee et al., 2002, Costa et al., 2005), and it has been concluded that shear strain plays a significant role in forming ultrafine grains during ARB.

One of the key issues of the ARB process is the bond strength which refers to the interfacial shear strength between two layers of the ARB-processed sheet. A sound bonding will contribute significantly to the success of the ARB process. Surface treatment prior to roll bonding has a significant effect on the bond strength. Current treatments mainly comprise degreasing and wire-brushing for removing oxide surface layers that inhibit interfacial bonding. In this paper, the nano-sized SiO₂ particles have been used in the ARB process to enhance the bond strength. It has been found that the bond strength can be significantly increased by using the nano-sized SiO₂ particles. The mechanical properties and microstructures of the ARB-processed samples will also be discussed.

Section snippets

Rolling mill

A Hille 100 two-high experimental rolling mill was used to conduct the experiments. The mill was driven by an infinitely variable speed motor of 56 kW. The maximum rolling load, torque and speed were 1500 kN, 13 kNm and 70 rpm, respectively. The rolls were designed with 250 mm diameter and 254 mm barrel length, made of Böhler W302 tool steel. The roll surface was treated by the nitride hardening and its hardness was 65–70 HRc within a depth of 0.2–0.3 mm. The roll surfaces have been ground and the

Results and discussion

The tensile properties of the ARB-deformed samples are shown in Fig. 2. It is clear that the strength increases and the elongation decreases with the increasing layers in the samples (or rolling cycles) due to work-hardening. The annealed original sample exhibits the good ductility and low strength. The strength rapidly increases once the samples are processed by ARB. The sample with 16 layers has the maximum strength. As the ARB rolling cycle further increases to five cycles (32 layers in the

Conclusion

ARB is one of the most promising methods for the industrial production of UFG sheet materials. The poor bond strength is one of the major drawbacks in the ARB process. In this paper, the nano-sized SiO₂ particles have been used to enhance the bond strength. The major conclusions include:

•
The ultimate tensile strength and yield strength of the ARB-processed samples increase with the increasing strain and slightly decreased at very high strain. The elongation drops in all the ARB-processed samples.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the financial support from an Australia Research Council Discovery Grant.

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Significant enhancement of bond strength in the accumulative roll bonding process using nano-sized SiO2 particles

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Rolling mill

Results and discussion

Conclusion

Acknowledgement

Journal of Alloys and Compounds

Materials Science and Engineering A

Science and Technology of Advanced Materials

Scripta Materialia

Journal of Materials Processing Technology

Materials Science and Engineering A

Scripta Materialia

Materials Science and Engineering A

Scripta Materialia

Significant enhancement of bond strength in the accumulative roll bonding process using nano-sized SiO₂ particles