Texture evolution during wire drawing of Mg-RE alloy

Additions of rare-earth (RE) elements to extruded magnesium alloys can lead to a weaker texture and the emergence of a new "RE-texture" component. Understanding the formation of this component after extrusion is difficult because the final microstructure is often either partly or fully dynamically recrystallized. In this paper, a magnesium alloy with RE addition was deformed by wire drawing at room temperature. This has enabled a fully unrecrystallized microstructure to be retained after axis-symmetric deformation. The drawn microstructure was characterized by elongated grains with a strong basal fiber texture. Tensile, compression and double twins were visible but shear bands were not. During annealing, new statically recrystallized grains formed at grain and twin boundaries, leading to gradual weakening of the drawn texture but no emergence of the distinctive RE texture occurred. This observation suggests that shear banding has a critical role in forming the RE texture.