Highly Thermally Stable Microstructure in Mg Fabricated Via Powder Rolling

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate a fascinating microstructure that ensures Mg has a high thermal stability. This is achieved by fabricating the Mg sample via powder rolling followed by powder metallurgy method. It is found that after Mg powders are pretreated for 15 rolling passes at room temperature and then consolidated by using spark plasma sintering, the Mg specimen exhibits a much finer grain structure. Such a grain structure then shows a super high thermal stability. Worthy of note is that many fractions of tensile twins were presented in the Mg specimen and survived a heat treatment at 500°C. After the heat treatment, the microhardness of the sample remained almost unchanged. The finding then gives rise to the possibility of using Mg as structural material at elevated temperatures.