Investigation of deformation size effects during microextrusion

Microextrusion has recently emerged as a feasible manufacturing process to fabricate metallic micropins having characteristic dimensions on the order of less < 1 min. At this length scale, the deformation of the workpiece is dominated by the so-called size effects, e.g., material property and frictional behavior variations at small length scales. In extrusion experiments performed to produce submillimeter-sized pins having a base diameter of 0.76 mm and an extruded diameter of 0.57 mm, the extruded pins exhibited a curving tendency when a workpiece with a relatively coarse grain size of 211 Am was used. This phenomenon was not observed when workpieces with a finer grain Size of 32 Am were used. In this paper, results from microhardness tests and microstructure analyses for both grain sizes are presented to investigate this phenomenon and to characterize the deformation during microextrusion. The results obtained from this analysis show that as the grain size approaches the specimen feature size, the deformation characteristics of the extruded pins are dominated by the size and location of specific grains, leading to a nonuniform distribution of plastic strain and measured hardness and, thus, the curving tendency. Microhardness tests of the initial billet material and tensile test specimens are also presented as supplementary analyses.