Effect of Si content on earing behavior in deep drawing of 3104 aluminum alloy sheets

Effect of Si content on the change of earing behavior in deep drawing of 3104 aluminum alloy sheets, under manufacturing processes in which partial annealing and light reduction cold rolling were applied to promote preferential growth of cube-oriented grains related to earing, was investigated. With increasing Si content, the number of fine intermetallic particles acting as Zener pinning force increases, and the critical diameter of recrystallization nuclei of random-oriented grains is increased. As a result, the number of the coarse particles acting as particle stimulated nucleation (PSN) mechanism decreases and the area fraction of Cube-oriented grains increases relatively, where the earing decreases (0, 90° ear increases). The earing is negatively correlated with the area fraction of Cube grains. On the other hand, in the range of Si content of 0.20 to 0.35 mass%, the area fraction of Cube grains and the earing does not change monotonically and shows characteristic behavior. This is considered to be due to the behavior of the number of particles acting as PSN mechanism, determined by the distribution of coarse and fine particles.