Manufacturing Ultrafine-Grained Ti-6Al-4V Bulk Rod Using Multi-Pass Caliber-Rolling

Abstract

Ultrafine-grained (UFG) Ti-6Al-4V alloy has attracted attention from the various industries due to its good mechanical properties. Although severe plastic deformation (SPD) processes can produce such a material, its dimension is generally limited to laboratory scale. The present work utilized the multi-pass caliber-rolling process to fabricate Ti-6Al-4V bulk rod with the equiaxed UFG microstructure. The manufactured alloy mainly consisted of alpha phase and showed the fiber texture with the basal planes parallel to the rolling direction. This rod was large enough to be used in the industry and exhibited comparable tensile properties at room temperature in comparison to SPD-processed Ti-6Al-4V alloys. The material also showed good formability at elevated temperature due to the occurrence of superplasticity. Internal-variable analysis was carried out to measure the contribution of deformation mechanisms at elevated temperatures in the manufactured alloy. This revealed the increasing contribution of phase/grain-boundary sliding at 1073 K, which explained the observed superplasticity.