recycling of magnesium machining chips via shear consolidation processing

In this research, the feasibility of solid-state recycling of pure magnesium (mg) chips is investigated by applying a synthesis technique called shear consolidation processing (scp). during the scp, machining chips are first loaded into the container and slightly compacted, and then a rotating tool with a designated diameter is plunged into the mg chips at a selected spindle rotation speed and feed rate. due to the huge amount of heat generation, the softened materials are compressed and synthesized to form a consolidated part eventually. the results show that the scp process is a feasible solution for producing a void-free consolidated material directly from mg chips in a single step. the microstructure analysis using optical microscopy (om) and scanning electron microscopy (sem) shows a significant grain refinement in the produced part compared with the base material (from around 900 μm to 11 μm). the recycled specimen has a much higher hardness (at least 100% increase) than the parent material and also exhibits better wear resistance. this improvement is attributed to the resulting fine-grained microstructure due to severe plastic deformation during the scp process.