On twinning and anisotropy in rolled Mg alloy AZ31 under uniaxial tension

The Elastic Visco-Plastic Self-Consistent (EVPSC) model, with the recently developed Twinning and De-Twinning (TDT) description, is applied to study the mechanical behaviour of hot-rolled Mg alloy AZ31 under uniaxial tension. Numerical results are compared to the experimental uniaxial tensile tests reported earlier by Chapuis et al. [29] for the out-of-plane directions of a thick plate along angles of α = 0°, 30°, 45°, 60° and 90° between the normal direction and longitudinal specimen axis. It is shown that accounting for the initial texture and calibrating the EVPSC-TDT model by using uniaxial tension tests along the rolling direction and normal direction permits prediction of the strength anisotropy and strain hardening behavior along all five tensile directions, i.e. for cases in which the contribution of twinning is dominating, negligible or intermediate.