An insight into the vibration-assisted rolling of AA5052 aluminum alloy: Tensile strength, deformation microstructure, and texture evolution

Abstract Lightweight metals and alloys should have high strength and moderate ductility if they want to meet the requirements of practical applications. For this aim, a continuous severe plastic deformation technique entitled vibration-assisted rolling (VAR) was introduced to produce high-strength AA5052 aluminum alloy. Also, the effect of annealing heat-treatment was investigated on mechanical properties, microstructure characterization, and texture evolution of the VAR-processed samples. It was found that this process can severely deform the sheets through two rollers, the bottom roller of which is associated with vibration, using plastic pressure, and shear deformation. The results showed that the strength of the VAR-processed sample (369 MPa) is much higher than when using a conventional rolling process (181 MPa). Additionally, at annealing temperatures of 150 and 200 °C, the yield strength of the VAR-processed AA5052 sheet reached 324 and 302 MPa, respectively. In this regard, the elongation to failure of the above sample at 200 °C annealing temperature reached about 8%. Besides, the ultrafine-grained microstructure was observed in the VAR-processed samples even after annealing conditions. Eventually, a strong Cube texture was obtained at the 150 °C annealing temperature in the VAR-processed aluminum; whereas, the annealed alloy under the conventional rolling condition did not show this strong Cube texture.