Grain refinement of DC cast magnesium alloys with intensive melt shearing

Abstract

A new direct chill (DC) casting process, melt conditioned DC (MC-DC) process, has been developed for the production of high quality billets/slabs of light alloys by application of intensive melt shearing through a rotor-stator high shear device during the DC casting process. The rotor-stator high shear device provides intensive melt shearing to disperse the naturally occurring oxide films, and other inclusions, while creating a microscopic flow pattern to homogenize the temperature and composition fields in the sump. In this paper, we report the grain refining effect of intensive melt shearing in the MC-DC casting processing. Experimental results on DC casting of Mg-alloys with and without intensive melt shearing have demonstrated that the MC-DC casting process can produce magnesium alloy billets with significantly refined microstructure. Such grain refinement in the MC-DC casting process can be attributed to enhanced heterogeneous nucleation by dispersed naturally occurring oxide particles, increased nuclei survival rate in uniform temperature and compositional fields in the sump, and potential contribution from dendrite arm fragmentation.