Abstract
Liquid-solid forming under high pressure involves the solidification coupled with deformation under high pressure, which will improve the properties of materials or products without requiring very high forming load. Squeeze casting is a typical liquid-solid forming process under high pressure proposed initially by Russian researchers in the 1930s. Later, semisolid forming processes have been widely established since 1970s. It is worthy to mention that the international conference of semisolid processing on alloys and composites has been held for 12 times (one time every two years) in different countries. With the progress of technologies on the liquid-solid forming, liquid-solid extrusion process and other new processes have also been developed since 1980s. Recent advances have been achieved in the field of liquid-solid forming under high pressure, which encourages us to summarize them for better development in the future.
In this special issue, investigators were invited to contribute original research articles in certain topics, namely, process development, microstructure and properties, modeling and simulation, and industrial applications.
All of the fifteen submitted papers were carefully reviewed. Finally, only eight articles, dealing with liquid-solid forming related to light alloy aluminum, magnesium, and their composites, have been accepted. However, the covered topics by the accepted papers are not a comprehensive representation of the area of liquid-solid forming in mechanical engineering. Nonetheless, this special issue represents the recent development in the community and we are pleased to share them with readers. The following articles have been published: “Squeeze casting of semisolid A356 alloy” by X.-J. Yang et al., “Thin-plate forming by thixo- and rheoforging” by C. K. Jin et al., “Microstructure and mechanical properties of AM50A magnesium alloy components prepared by die casting and double control forming” by J.-F. Jiang et al., “Wear behavior of extruded nano-SiCp reinforced AZ61 magnesium matrix composites” by H. Yan et al., “Numerical simulation of liquid-solid extrusion process based on the mechanical model coupled with solidification” by J.-M. Zhou and L.-H. Qi, “Liquid segregation phenomenological behaviors of Ti14 alloy during semisolid deformation” by Y.-N. Chen et al., “Formation and growth mechanism of globular crystal of ADC12 aluminum alloy by near-liquidus squeeze casting” by S.-Z. Wang et al., and “Effects of process parameters on microstructure of A2017 alloy strip produced by a novel semisolid rolling” by Z.-Y. Zhao et al.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
As the guest editors of the special issue, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to all of the authors who contributed their work to this interesting special issue. We also thank the reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments that greatly benefited the improvement of the papers quality.