EDITORIAL

Abstract

Crystallographic texture analysis has become an inherent part ofmodern steel and aluminium sheet production. From the cast ingotto the final product, the combination of plastic deformation andthermal practices affects the texture and anisotropy of theproduct and, thus, ultimately the material performance. Thechallenge for an effective production scheme, and for thedevelopment of new production processes, is to use appropriatemodels to predict the evolution of crystallographic texture withprocessing and the relationship of texture to the properties. During the 1998 TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society) Fall Meeting in Rosemont, IL, a symposium washeld on The Modelling of Texture and Anisotropic Properties inSteel and Aluminium Industries for Optimum Materials Performance(11 - 15 October 1998).The objective of this symposium was to bring researchers fromindustrial laboratories and universities together to discuss recent advances in the area of modelling texture developmentand texture anisotropy correlations in the aluminium and steelindustries. Problems involving the modelling of texture evolutionduring rolling and annealing processes and the modelling ofcorrelations between texture and formability and other mechanicalproperties were addressed.In the contribution by L Delannay, P Van Houtte andD Vanderschueren, `Application of a texture parameter model tostudy planar anisotropy of rolled steel sheets', a new model isproposed for the characterization of steel sheet textures. Thismodel relies on the identification of 25 relevant parameters inthe orientation distribution function, and it can quantitativelyreproduce almost any industrial steel sheet texture. Predictions of yield stresses and plastic strain ratios of lowcarbon steels from a Taylor-Bishop-Hill model usingexperimentally determined crystallographic textures are comparedto experimentally determined values by E Hoferlin, A Van Bael,P Van Houtte, G Steyaert, C De Maré in their paper, `The design of a biaxialtensile test and its use for the validation of crystallographicyield loci'. For this comparison, a biaxial tensile test wasdesigned to experimentally determine the yield locus points ofthin steel sheets. The plastic anisotropy of strongly textured polycrystals with andwithout a distribution of non-shearable precipitates isquantitatively assessed in `Plastic anisotropy inprecipitation-strengthened aluminium alloys deformed in uniaxial and plane strain deformation' by F Barlat, J Liu and J C Brem.A model based on kinematic hardening concepts was developed toquantitatively describe the plastic behaviour of materialscontaining non-shearable precipitates in Al-Cualloys. The model predictions are validated by experimentalresults obtained from binary aluminium-copper alloys.Finally, the contribution from D Raabe and R Becker,`Coupling of a crystal plasticity finite-element model with aprobabilistic cellular automaton for simulating primary staticrecrystallization in aluminium', predicts the accumulation of localstrain during plastic deformation by finite-element modelling.It then usesthe predicted strain distribution to simulate therecrystallization behaviour of an aluminium sample by a cellularautomata approach. Hasso Weiland, Alcoa, Chairman, ASM Texture and AnisotropyCommittee Jerzy Szpunar, McGill University, past committee chairman