Category
Oral - Basic
Description
Magnesium is a lightweight structural metal used everywhere from industrial equipment to bioengineering. It is often mixed with other metals to create alloys with certain desirable characteristics. To better implement these alloys, an accurate understanding of their behavior and structure is necessary. This project will investigate the behavior of magnesium alloy ZK60. Mechanical testing will provide results describing the behavior of the material at various temperatures. The mechanical testing will be conducted using the Instron static loading machine and furnace attachment at the Center for Engineering Research & Education (CERE) to apply compressive force to the magnesium specimens at temperatures ranging from 20 °C to 300 °C. The data from these tests will be recorded in stress-strain curves and analyzed so that conclusions about the properties of the magnesium ZK60 alloy can be drawn. These results will be compared to experiments in established scientific literature. The magnesium ZK60 alloy will also be analyzed using the metallurgy lab and several types of microscopes (confocal, scanning electron microscope (SEM), electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), etc.) at CERE. Analysis will be conducted to report key quantitative and qualitative findings for this material’s microstructure and behavior. This research will be valuable in the future as it is part of the initial investigation of the cast material that shows twinning within large grains. Future work will build on this to investigate this alloy after processing to describe how it changes when new microstructures and textures are added.
Mechanical Testing & Characterization of ZK60 Magnesium at Various Temperatures
Oral - Basic
Magnesium is a lightweight structural metal used everywhere from industrial equipment to bioengineering. It is often mixed with other metals to create alloys with certain desirable characteristics. To better implement these alloys, an accurate understanding of their behavior and structure is necessary. This project will investigate the behavior of magnesium alloy ZK60. Mechanical testing will provide results describing the behavior of the material at various temperatures. The mechanical testing will be conducted using the Instron static loading machine and furnace attachment at the Center for Engineering Research & Education (CERE) to apply compressive force to the magnesium specimens at temperatures ranging from 20 °C to 300 °C. The data from these tests will be recorded in stress-strain curves and analyzed so that conclusions about the properties of the magnesium ZK60 alloy can be drawn. These results will be compared to experiments in established scientific literature. The magnesium ZK60 alloy will also be analyzed using the metallurgy lab and several types of microscopes (confocal, scanning electron microscope (SEM), electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), etc.) at CERE. Analysis will be conducted to report key quantitative and qualitative findings for this material’s microstructure and behavior. This research will be valuable in the future as it is part of the initial investigation of the cast material that shows twinning within large grains. Future work will build on this to investigate this alloy after processing to describe how it changes when new microstructures and textures are added.
Comments
Undergraduate