Global and local structural evolution during deformation and annealing of FCC metals

Deformation of metals from medium to high strain significantly affect the deformation structure as well as the recovery and recrystallization behaviour when deformed samples are annealed. This behaviour is illustrated for FCC metals of medium to high stacking fault energy, with emphasis on the behaviour of aluminium and aluminium alloys deformed by cold rolling to large strain. The analysis encompasses hardness testing, EBSD and TEM. The deformation microstructure is a lamellar structure of dislocation boundaries and high angle boundaries where the percentages of the latter increases to about 60-80% at large strain. The macrotexture is a typical rolling texture, which is composed of individual texture components present as micrometre and submicrometre size volumes. In the lamellar structure correlations have been established between microstructural parameters and local orientations showing for example variations in stored energy between the texture components and large variations in the spatial distributions of the high angle lamellar boundaries. Such local variations can affect the structural coarsening during recovery at low temperature leading to significant structural difference on a local scale. The local variations in the deformed structure can also significantly affect the structural changes taking place locally during high temperature annealing thereby affecting the evolution of the structure and texture on a macroscopic scale.