Fabrication of ultrafine-grained Mg microtubes using a combined severe plastic deformation process for biomedical application

In recent years, Mg alloys have received much attention as a promising candidate for raw material in biodegradable vascular stent. Forming of Mg alloys is difficult because of poor workability of them at room temperature. Hence this presents a technological barrier to the fabrication of initial micro-tube for a biodegradable stent. With regard to high biodegradability of the magnesium alloy WE43 to manufacture biodegradable stent, it has been selected as initial with casted structure. In this study, for enhancing mechanical properties and attaining micro tube a combination of equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) with extrusion and micro extrusion was used and Mg bars were fabricated to high-quality micro-tubes with refined microstructure. Fine-grained size billets of the WE43 alloy were obtained by one-pass of ECAP. The processed Mg bar was extruded into a bar with 5 mm in diameter. Finally, a UFG and high strength micro tubes with an outside diameter of 3.4mm and a wall thickness of 0.25mm were successfully produced by micro extrusion process. Mentioned processes were simulated using finite element (FE) simulations. The result shows the grain size of Mg incredibly reduced after this combined method and mechanical properties were significantly improved.