Enhancement of ductility and improvement of abnormal Goss grain growth of magnetostrictive Fe–Ga rolled alloys

The influences of initial microstructures on the mechanical properties and the recrystallization texture of magnetostrictive 0.1 at% Nb C-doped Fe83 Ga17 alloys were investigated. The directionally solidified columnar-grained structure substantially enhanced the tensile elongation at intermediate temperatures by suppressing fracture along the transverse boundaries. Compared with tensile elongations of 1.0% at 300℃ and 12.0% at 500℃ of the hot-forged equiaxed-grained alloys, the columnar-grained alloys exhibited substantially increased tensile elongations of 21.6% at 300℃ and 46.6% at 500℃. In the slabs for rolling, the introduction of <001>-oriented columnar grains also promotes the secondary recrystallization of Goss grains in the finally annealed sheets, resulting in an improvement of the saturation magnetostriction. For the columnar-grained specimens, the inhomogeneous microstructure and disadvantage in number and size of Goss grains are improved in the primarily annealed sheets, which is beneficial to the abnormal growth of Goss grains during the final annealing process.