The mechanics of the friction-assisted lateral extrusion process

The friction-assisted lateral extrusion process (FALEP) is gaining attention as a candidate for fabricating high-performance ultrafine grain alloys for potential industrial applications. It consists of extruding metal in bulk or powder form into a solid sheet in a single operation to obtain ultrafine-grained (UFG) structures. The sheet has high yield strength due to its UFG microstructure and a shear-type crystallographic texture that is fundamentally different from the textures of sheets obtained by rolling. Apart from its single-step feature, FALEP requires lower forces than in rolling, so less energy is required to achieve large reductions. The present work introduces analytical elastic/plastic continuum calculations for the mechanics of the FALEP process. The results of the calculations demonstrate the great advantages of FALEP with respect to rolling and equal/non-equal channel angular pressings.