A new strategy to simultaneous increase in the strength and ductility of AA2024 alloy via accumulative roll bonding (ARB)

Nano/ultrafine grained (NG/UFG) AA2024 alloy produced by accumulative roll bonding (ARB) showed high strength (420 MPa) and very limited elongation (about 1.3%). A new strategy via ARB was developed to improve elongation (about 10%) of AA2024 alloy with a relatively high strength (365 MPa). The present strategy produced a bimodal structure consisting of coarse and ultrafine elongated grains in comparison to the UFG alloy. Electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) revealed that after 4 ARB cycles, the fraction of high angle grain boundaries and mean misorientation angle of the boundaries in the bimodal grain structure were 61% and 27.34°, respectively, in comparison to that of annealed (54% and 24.96°) and UFG (79% and 34.27°) alloy. The crystallographic texture results indicated that, unlike the annealed AA2024 alloy, the intensity of Brass {011}<211> and S {123}<634> components remarkably increased in the UFG and bimodal alloy. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) observations demonstrated that failure mode in bimodal alloy was ductile fracture with a combination of deep and shallow dimples.