Magnesium and its alloys are attractive materials in industrial applications due to the low density and high strength. The properties of AZ31 magnesium alloy can be much improved by choosing proper sintering conditions. In this study, the microstructure and mechanical properties of AZ31 prepared by mechanical alloying, compaction, and sintering of elemental powder, were studied. The effect of parameters such as compaction pressure, heating rate, and sintering time were investigated to determine the optimal sintering condition of AZ31 magnesium alloys. Previous researches have focused on the specific conditions of sintering, while in this study, various factors of sintering were examined simultaneously. The results showed that sintering time is one of the major variables that have a considerable effect on the final properties of AZ31. In short sintering times, recrystallization leads to small grain formation inside the powder. However, as the sintering time increases, the growth of new grains slows down and no trace of them can be detected in the microstructure. Furthermore, the conditions for recrystallization were also determined, which can be used to provide small grain size and, consequently, better properties after the initial powder milling and sintering. At optimal sintering conditions, the average grain size, porosity percentage and hardness of the samples AZ31 magnesium alloy were obtained as 104 µm and 2.05%, and 79.5 HV, respectively which is expectable result in comparison to the bulk AZ31. Manuscript profile

In this paper, the torsional free vibration of solid and hollow rotating shafts with non-uniform tapered elements are investigated. To this end, the exact solution and also transfer matrix for the free torsional vibration of a hollow tapered shaft element with uniform thickness and also solid element are firstly obtained. Then, the natural frequencies are determined based on distributed and lumped modeling technique (DLMT). This technique is similar to transfer matrix method (TMM) but the exact solution is employed to obtain the transfer matrixes of the distributed element, therefore, there is no approximation and the natural frequencies and mode shapes are the exact values. To confirm the reliability of the presented method, the simulation results are compared with the results obtained from the other methods such as finite element method. It is shown that the proposed method provides highly accurate results and it can be simply applied to the complex torsional systems. Manuscript profile