Deformation behavior of semi-solid A356 Al–Si alloy at low shear rates: The effect of sample size

The rheological behavior of semi-solid metal slurries at low shear rates can be characterized by parallel plate compression tests of cylindrical discs where the height (h) is much smaller than the diameter (d) and the axial flow is assumed negligible or zero against the radial flow.In order to confirm the validity of required aspect ratio, two sets of cylindrical test samples with (h/d) of 0.4, d = 24 mm small discs, and 1.8, d = 75 mm billets, were prepared with similar microstructures. The small specimens were tested in a parallel plate squeezing flow rheometer to determine the viscosities which were compared to the viscosity values of samples (billets) with larger aspect ratios using a similar large scale apparatus.For the billets, rheocast samples, it was shown that the dendritic primary α-Al structure has the highest viscosity. The viscosity decreases when the structure comprises a rosette or globular morphology. Similar results were obtained for the discs, thixocast samples, where the specimens have similar initial microstructure.The results confirmed that for low shear rates, less than 10−2 s−1, the viscosity of semi-solid alloy is dependent mainly on the morphology of the primary particles and not the sample size.