Orientation relationship between primary and secondary recrystallized texture in electrical steel

Cube ({100}<001>) texture is developed through secondary recrystallization when rolling direction is changed towards the transverse direction at the final stage of cold-rolling of grain-oriented electrical steel. The development of the cube texture is discussed stressing the role of high-energy boundary having the misorientation angle between 20 and 45degrees, which was used for the explanation of the development of Goss ({110}<001>) texture in our previous works. The high-energy boundary has more structural defects, which are linked to high mobility and high grain boundary diffusion rate. Quicker coarsening of precipitates enables high-energy boundaries to move earlier than other boundaries during final annealing. A texture component that has the highest frequency of high-energy boundary can be a main component through selective growth during secondary recrystallization. Textures different from Goss can also be predicted by analyzing the frequency of high-energy boundaries in the primary recrystallized texture. The growth model based on Coincident Site Lattice (CSL) boundaries and another model based on Orientation Pinning (OP) are tested, but these models cannot provide a consistent explanation in the present experiment. (C) 2002 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.