Ductility, bending and wrapping ability relationship in wires made of electromagnetically cast ultrafine grained Al–0.5Fe and Al–0.5Fe–0.3Cu alloys

The research status on such functional properties, as bending capability, wrapping capability and ductility of conductive Al–Fe and Al–Fe–Cu alloys wires is uncertain. Bending and wrapping capability is determined by the industrial standards while no attempts were made to study the relation between them and ductility of the Al alloys wires, paying even less attention to the ultrafine-grained Al-based wires, produced by electromagnetic casting and equal-channel angular pressing. In this study alloys with two different chemical compositions (Al–0.5 wt. % Fe and Al–0.5 wt. % Fe–0.3 wt. % Cu) and two different casting methods (casting into electromagnetic mold and continuous casting and rolling) were used. Part of the wires for the study was prepared by cold drawing (CD), the other part – by the combination of the equal-channel angular pressing by the Conform scheme and cold drawing (ECAP-C+CD) to obtain coarse grained (CG) and ultrafine grained (UFG) structures, respectively. Annealing at 230 °C for 1 h was carried out to evaluate the thermal stability of the wires. It was shown that the correlation between ductility (elongation to failure), number of wraps and number of bends (both before the first crack and before complete failure of the specimen) may differ depending on the deformation value, deformation scheme, and amount of alloying elements of the alloy wire, as well as ability to form solid solutions.