The hot deformation behaviors of the new 6063 aluminum alloy modified by rare earth Y and Al-Ti-B master alloy were studied through isothermal hot compression experiments on the Gleeble-3800 thermal simulator. By characterizing the flow curves, constitutive models, hot processing maps, and microstructures, we can see from the true stress-true strain curves that the flow stress decreases with the increase of deformation temperature and the decrease of strain rate. Through the calculation of the constitutive equation, we derived that the activation energy of the new composite modified 6063 aluminum alloy is 224.570 KJ/mol. we roughly obtained its excellent hot processing range of temperatures between 470-540 °C and the strain rates of 0.01-0.1 s-1. The verification of the deformed microstructure shows that with the decrease of lnZ, the grain boundary changes from a low-angle one to a high-angle one and the dynamic recrystallization is dominated by geometric dynamic recrystallization and continuous dynamic recrystallization. Analysis of typical samples at 480 °C/0.01 s-1 shows that the addition of rare earth Y mainly helps form Al3Y5 and AlFeSiY phases, thus making the alloy have the performance of high-temperature recrystallization, which is beneficial to the hot workability of the alloy.
Keywords: 6063 aluminum alloy; constitutive equation; hot deformation behavior; microstructure evolution; processing map.