Materials Transactions, Vol. 49, No. 5 (2008) pp.

967 to 971
Special Issue on Platform Science and Technology for Advanced Magnesium Alloys, IV
#2008 The Japan Institute of Metals

Yield and Densification Behavior of Rapidly Solidified Magnesium Powders

Seung Chae Yoon1 , Eun Jeong Kwak1 , Taek-Soo Kim2 ,
Byeong Sun Cheon1 and Hyoung Seop Kim1; *
1
Department of Nano Materials Engineering, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, 305-764, Korea
2
Advanced Materials R&D Center, Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH),
Techno-Park Songdo, Incheon 406-130, Korea

In order to obtain high-quality products in powder metallurgy, it is important to control and understand the densification behavior of
metallic powders. The effect of the powder characteristics of magnesium powders on the compaction behavior was investigated in this study by
experimental and theoretical methods. A modified version of Lee-Kim’s plastic yield criterion, known as the critical relative density model, was
applied to simulate the densification behavior of magnesium powders, and a new approach that extracts both the powder and the matrix
characteristics was developed. The model was implemented via the finite element method, and powder compaction under upsetting conditions
was simulated. The calculated and experimental results are in good agreement. [doi:10.2320/matertrans.MC200724]

(Received October 5, 2007; Accepted January 28, 2008; Published March 12, 2008)
Keywords: magnesium powder, densification, critical relative density constitutive model, cold isostatic pressing, finite element analysis

1. Introduction particular, a new technique able to extract both the powder

Magnesium and its alloys are attractive as lightweight
structural/functional materials for high-performance appli-
cations in the automobile and electronics industries due to
advantageous properties such as their low density, high
specific strength, superior dent resistance, and their damping
capacity and shield capacity against electromagnetic waves.1)
However, their poor ductility and workability attributable to
a small number of slip systems in the basal plane and
difficulty in the dislocation activities in the non-basal plane
together have limited further engineering applications. A
general strategy to enhance the ductility and workability
while not sacrificing the strength of metallic materials is
grain refinement.1–3) Rapid solidification has become a
widely used method for grain refinement.4)
Rapidly solidified magnesium and magnesium alloy
powders are challenging materials for use in the manufacture
of high-performance advanced structural engineering
parts. Even if newly developed powder materials are good
from a performance viewpoint for applications in engineering
parts with complex shapes, they may not be economically
viable because of the expensive powder processing technol-
ogy required for powder consolidation. Therefore, in
order to obtain high-quality magnesium products in powder
metallurgy, it is important to control and understand the
densification/compaction behavior of metallic powders
effectively.
For precise control the deformation process of materials,
pressure-dependent plasticity theories with numerical meth-
ods have been widely used for both porous5–8) and solid
materials. The densification behavior of magnesium powders
during cold isostatic pressing was investigated in this study
using gas atomized magnesium powders. A modified version
of Lee-Kim’s plastic yield criterion, known as the critical
relative density model, was applied to simulate the powder
densification behavior of the magnesium powders. In
*Corresponding author, E-mail: hskim@cnu.ac.kr
parameters and the solid material parameters is proposed.
The model was implemented into the finite element method,
and powder compaction characteristics under various proc-
essing conditions were simulated.
2. Experiments
Commercially available gas atomized pure magnesium
powder was used in this study. The powders were mechan-
ically sieved for an analysis of their size and size distribu-
tions, and the sieved powders were then examined under a
field-emission scanning electron microscope (JSM-7000F,
JEOL). The particle size and size distribution were measured
by a laser scattering particle size analyzer (HELOS/
RODOS, Sympatec GmbH) using a He-Ne tube of 0.1 mm
in resolution.
The atomized and sieved powders were cold isostatic
pressed to a height of 20 mm and a diameter of 20 mm
(20 mm
20 mm) in a cylindrical rubber tube, to compact
the powders to a porous green perform. The cold isostatic
pressing has the advantage of reducing directionality and
promoting homogeneous products as well as simple shaping
and compaction. The rubber tube with powders inside was
placed in the pressure chamber and loaded by an isostatic
pressure, after which the pressure was released and the
specimen was removed from the chamber. A cold isostatic
press (ABB Auto Clave Systems Inc.) was used. Isostatic
pressings of 50, 100,150, 200, 250, and 300 MPa were
applied for 5 mins. after reaching the press. The densities of
the compacts after the cold isostatic pressing were measured
using the Archimedean method.
3. Plastic Yield Modeling of Powders
A pressure-dependent plastic yield model was applied to
analyze the densification behavior during the compaction of
magnesium powders. The general pressure-dependent plastic
yield5) can be expressed in eq. (1).
968 S. C. Yoon, E. J. Kwak, T.-S. Kim, B. S. Cheon and H. S. Kim

Fig. 1 Scanning electron micrographs of magnesium powders produced by the gas atomization method.

tion occurs at surface irregularities of the powders. These

AJ20 þ BJ12 ¼ YR2 ¼ CY02 :
Here, J1 and J20 are the first stress invariant and the second
deviatoric stress invariant, respectively. YR is the apparent
yield stress or flow stress of a porous material and Y0 is the
yield stress of the non-porous matrix material. The coef-
ficients A, B and C are functions of the relative density.
In this study, the general yield function eq. (1) for the
powders and porous materials was modified to eq. (2) for the
analysis of the compaction and densification behavior of
powders. The densification behavior of magnesium powders
was analyzed using this equation.
1  R2 2
ð2 þ R2 ÞJ20 þ J1
3 ð2Þ
¼ YR2 ¼ ððR  RT Þ=ð1  RT ÞÞ0:85=RT Y02 :
Here, R is the relative density of the porous material, RT is the
critical relative density of the metal powder, that may be
interpreted as the critical relative density where the yield
stress or flow stress of a porous material is zero: that is,
YR ¼ 0 at R ¼ RT . The exponent 0.85/RT was determined
from experimental results of the characteristics of the
powders in various types of rapidly solidified powders.3) It
should be noted that RT is an experimental parameter that
varies with powder characteristics such as the shape, size and
size distribution. That is if the shape of the powders is
irregular, the tap density is low, relatively more sliding
between powder particles occurs, and local intense deforma-
ð1Þ
sliding and local plastic deformation behaviors make the
densification of the powder compact relatively easy in early
stage of compaction.
The hardening that is only dependent on the relative
density is termed ‘‘geometrical hardening’’ or ‘‘densification
hardening’’. It can be represented by the term ðR  RT Þ=
ð1  RT Þ. The hardening that depends on changes of the
mechanical properties of the base material can be termed
‘‘strain hardening’’ and is represented by Y0 . It should be
noted that the total hardening of porous materials during
plastic deformation is the product of ‘‘geometrical’’ and
‘‘strain’’ hardening. Eq. (1) is useful for the plasticity
analysis of the densification behavior of powders because
the only powder parameter to be obtained is the critical
relative density RT , which is the initial density: densities
lower than the tap density are useless for the deformation
analysis.
The non-zero stress and strain components under hydro-
static pressure P can be expressed as
11 ¼
22 ¼
33 ¼ P,
and "11 ¼ "22 ¼ "33 ¼ ". Given that the principal stress
and strain components for all directions are identical, the
stress-strain relationship becomes the non-linear one-dimen-
sional equation shown in eq. (3), where the density R, the
hydrostatic pressure P and the strain " are inter-dependent.
The densification behavior, i.e. the pressure-density relation-
ship of eq. (3) can be solved using a Newton-Raphson
method.
 Yield and Densification Behavior of Rapidly Solidified Magnesium Powders 969

100 2.0

90 1.8
Cumulative Distribution
80 Density Distribution 1.6
Cumulative Distribution, %

Density Distribution, %
70 1.4

60 1.2

50 1.0

40 0.8

30 0.6

20 0.4

10 0.2

0 0.0
1 10 100 1000
Particle Size, d/µm
Fig. 2 Particle size and distribution measurement of the magnesium powders.

Fig. 3 Cold isostatic pressed magnesium compacts with various applied pressure values.

sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ties of the powder itself can be obtained using compaction

1=2 ððR  RT Þ=ð1  RT ÞÞ0:85=RT
P ¼ 3Y0 ðC=BÞ ¼ Y0
3ð1  R2 Þ
An additional unknown term in eq. (3) exists: the basic
material hardening Y0 ðRÞ. In general, the stress-strain behav-
ior of a rapidly solidified powder is difficult to obtain
experimentally, as the powders should be consolidated to a
bulk form, which is different from the powder state in terms
of the microstructural and mechanical properties. Hence, a
new scheme to obtain the stress-strain behavior of powders
needs to be developed. In this study, Y0 ð"Þ ¼ k"n was set and
eq. (3) is solved to obtain the powder parameter (RT ) and the
material parameters (k and n). This scheme is very useful for
metastable powders for which the initial state is difficult to
sustain during bulk formation processing, in that the proper-
experiments.
: ð3Þ
4. Results and Discussion
Figure 1 shows the morphology of the pure magnesium
powders. The powders were irregularly shaped. The average
size of the powders was measured to be 74.50 mm, as shown
in Fig. 2. Figure 3 shows the final samples shapes after the
cold isostatic pressing. The sample is uniform cylinder
shaped, without distortion, due to the uniform applied
pressure on the sample surfaces under the hydrostatic stress
states.
Figure 4 shows the experimental result of the relative
density of magnesium powder with an applied pressure
(densification curve) during cold isostatic pressing. The
970 S. C. Yoon, E. J. Kwak, T.-S. Kim, B. S. Cheon and H. S. Kim

1.00

1.0
0.95

FEM Result

Relative Density, R
Numerical Result
Relative Density, R

0.90 0.9
Experiment data

0.85
0.8

0.80

0.7
0.75

0.70 0.6
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 0 200 400 600 800 1000

Pressure, P/MPa Pressure, P/MPa

Fig. 4 Experimental densification curve (density vs. applied pressure) Fig. 6 Predicted and experimental densification results during cold
during cold isostatic pressing. isostatic pressing.

For engineering applications such as the shape forming of

20
automotive parts, and for theoretical studies, continuum-
based deformation analysis using the finite element method is
18
effective. Some forging simulations of magnesium alloys
16
have already been examined and reported.10,11) These reports
14 reproduced real processing well and give us important
Stress Y0, MPa

12 directions for processing optimization. However, the pre-

10
8
6
4
2 finite element method package DEFORM2D (ver. 9.0).
0 Cylindrical upsetting was utilized to show the applicability
0.000 0.001 0.002 0.003 0.004
Strain, ε
Fig. 5 Stress-strain curve of rapidly solidified magnesium powder.
relative density increases rapidly at the onset, and the rate of
increasing decreases as pressure is applied. By a numerical
simulation of the densification curve with the hydrostatic
pressure equation of eq. (3), the powder parameter RT and
magnesium matrix properties n and k were obtained as
RT ¼ 0:65, k ¼ 133 MPa, and n ¼ 0:385. It should be noted
that powder characteristics such as powder size, shape and
size distributions are embedded in the parameter RT . Figure 5
shows the stress vs. strain curve obtained by the densification
curve during the cold isostatic pressing. It shows clear strain-
hardening behavior. It should be stressed that both densifi-
cation behavior and plastic properties could be obtained
using the cold isostatic pressing experiment.
Figure 6 shows the calculated (symbol) and theoretically
predicted densification curves. The solid and dashed lines are
the numerically fitted curve using eq. (3) and the finite
element results, respectively. The solid and dashed lines are
difficult to distinguish, implying that the finite element
simulations were well utilized by implementing the pressure-
dependent critical relative density yield model eq. (3) into
the commercial finite element package DEFORM code.9) The
theoretically predicted densification behavior is in excellent
agreement with the experimental results quantitatively.
vious reports analyzed using the numerical simulations were
for solid magnesium and magnesium alloys, and powder
forming of magnesium was not dealt by the numerical
analysis. Hence, the modified pressure-dependent yield
models for powders were implemented into the commercial
0.005
of the powder model. The material parameters used in the
simulations were the same as those obtained from the cold
isostatic pressing analysis: RT ¼ 0:65, k ¼ 133 MPa, and
n ¼ 0:385. The initial cylindrical shape in Fig. 7(a) and (b)
shows the relative density distribution after a reduction of
50% in height. The initial relative density of 50% increased
in all regions, but the edge and core regions are the most
densified. Edge areas contacting die surfaces became fully
densified (R ¼ 1) and central part was densified up to
R ¼ 0:87. Additionally, the barreling regions (outer areas)
are less densified due to a friction (Coulomb coefficient
 ¼ 0:1) effect between the die and the surface in contact
with the cylinder.
5. Conclusions
Rapidly solidified pure magnesium powder was cold
isostatic pressed. The densification behavior during this
procedure was numerically and experimentally investigated.
The critical relative density model was applied to simulate
the powder densification behavior of the magnesium. A new
approach connecting the relative density and imposed
pressure yield stress of the matrix was developed in order
to extract both the powder and matrix characteristic param-
eters. The model was implemented into the finite element
method and powder compaction under upsetting conditions
was simulated. The calculated results were found to be in
good agreement with the experimental results.
 Yield and Densification Behavior of Rapidly Solidified Magnesium Powders 971

(a) (b)

Fig. 7 Cylindrical upsetting simulation: (a) initial shape, and (b) density distribution.

Acknowledgements 3) D. W. Brown, S. R. Agnew, M. A. M. Bourke, T. M. Holden, S. C.

This work was supported by the Korea Science and
Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) through the National
Research Lab. Program funded by the Ministry of Science
and Technology (No R0A-2007-000-20104-0).
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