Evaluation of Elastoplasticity-Dependent Creep Property of Magnesium Alloy With Indentation Method: A Reverse Numerical Algorithm and Experimental Validation

Abstract

Magnesium (Mg) alloys have been widely used in automotive and aerospace industries due to its merits of exceptional lightweight, super strong specific strength, and high corrosion-resistance, where intermetallic compounds with a small volume are very critical to achieve these excellent performance. This study proposes a reverse analysis that can be employed to extract elastoplasticity-dependent creep property of commercial die-cast Mg alloys and their intermetallic compounds from instrumented indentation with two sharp indenters. First, the creep deformation that obeys the Norton's law (ε˙ = Aσn) is studied, and the parameters of A and n are determined from two indentation experiments conducted with different sharp indenters. Then, a numerical algorithm and dimensional function developed is extended to extract the elastoplasticity of various metallic materials by focusing on the loading stage of indentation experiments. By considering the full loading history with both linear increase and holding stages of loads, we propose a framework of reverse analysis to determine both elastoplasticity and creep properties simultaneously. Parallel indentation experiments on pure magnesium and aluminum and Mg alloys are performed, and the results agree well with the numerical predictions.