Effect of misorientation of grain boundaries on the discontinuous precipitates of Cu–Ni–Si alloy

Abstract

In this study, the effects of differences in grain size, grain boundary type and misorientation on the initiation of discontinuous precipitates are investigated for the Cu–5Ni–1.25Si alloy. Samples with different grain sizes are obtained by thermomechanical treatment, and the smaller the grain size, the higher the percentage of discontinuous precipitate at the same aging time, while there is no significant difference in the growth rate of the reaction front of discontinuous precipitates. EBSD is used to study the effect of grain boundary misorientation on discontinuous precipitates, the characteristics of discontinuous precipitates initiation on different grain boundaries are investigated by multivariate statistical analysis. It is found that discontinuous precipitates only initiate from random grain boundaries instead of coincident site lattice boundaries, where random grain boundaries with misorientation angles of 30–50° are more prone to discontinuous precipitates. And the initiation of DPs at different misorientation axes is different. There is a clear borderline for the axes such as <102>, <103>, and <203>. The grain boundaries below this borderline do not initiate DP, while all grain boundaries below this angle initiate DPs. The cases for axes such as <112>, <114>, and <214> are more complicated. On these misorientation axes, grain boundaries with lower or higher misorientation angles do not initiate DPs, while grain boundaries at intermediate range misorientation angles do initiate DPs.