Prediction of Hot Tearing Susceptibility for Mg-Zn-(Al) Alloys

It is importance to be able to predict the hot tearing tendency for multicomponent magnesium alloys. Hot tearing is one of the most common and serious defects that occurs during the solidification of commercial magnesium alloys. Clyne and Davies correlated the susceptibility-composition relationship in binary systems based on the concept of the existence of critical time periods during the solidification process when the structure is most vulnerable to cracking. The present work first evaluates the hot tearing susceptibility (HTS) of binary Mg-Zn system using thermodynamic simulations based on Clyne-Davies' model, a typical "lambda shape" curve is obtained. And then a scaling factor is investigated to obtain the internal-consistent cracking susceptibility coefficient for further investigating the addition of aluminum on the HTS in the ternary Mg-Zn-Al system. The predicted hot tearing tendencies is consistent very well with the experimental results of the Mg-Zn binary system and Mg-Zn-Al ternary system.