Abstract
The current study presents a detailed investigation for the equal channel angular pressing of pure copper through two regimes. The first was equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) processing at room temperature and the second was ECAP processing at 200 °C for up to 4-passes of route Bc. The grain structure and texture was investigated using electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) across the whole sample cross-section and also the hardness and the tensile properties. The microstructure obtained after 1-pass at room temperature revealed finer equiaxed grains of about 3.89 µm down to submicrons with a high density of twin compared to the starting material. Additionally, a notable increase in the low angle grain boundaries (LAGBs) density was observed. This microstructure was found to be homogenous through the sample cross section. Further straining up to 2-passes showed a significant reduction of the average grain size to 2.97 µm with observable heterogeneous distribution of grains size. On the other hand, increasing the strain up to 4-passes enhanced the homogeneity of grain size distribution. The texture after 4-passes resembled the simple shear texture with about 7 times random. Conducting the ECAP processing at 200 °C resulted in a severely deformed microstructure with the highest fraction of submicron grains and high density of substructures was also observed. ECAP processing through 4-passes at room temperature experienced a significant increase in both hardness and tensile strength up to 180% and 124%, respectively.
Highlights
Copper (Cu) and Cu alloys have been found to possess fairly high strength, outstanding thermal conductivity, resistance to corrosion while being easy to fabricate; as a result, they have gained popular appeal in applications like automobile manufacturing, railway transportation, electrical and electronic industries, structural applications and applications involving heating or temperature measurement [1,2,3,4,5]
This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis for the effect of equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) on the mechanical properties, microstructural evolution, crystallographic texture, and hardness distribution across the ECAP processed commercial pure Cu
The effect of ECAP processing on the microstructural evolution, crystallographic texture and hardness variation of commercial purity Cu processed at room temperature (RT) and 200 ◦C for up to 4 passes of route Bc was comprehensively investigated
Summary
Copper (Cu) and Cu alloys have been found to possess fairly high strength, outstanding thermal conductivity, resistance to corrosion while being easy to fabricate; as a result, they have gained popular appeal in applications like automobile manufacturing, railway transportation, electrical and electronic industries, structural applications and applications involving heating or temperature measurement [1,2,3,4,5]. A common fix to this problem is the refinement of the grain structure on the nano-scale level using severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques [7,8,9] This produces ultrafine-grained (UFG) Cu that possesses many appealing properties such as the coexistence of high strength and ductility [4,10,11]. Among the plethora of SPD processes available are high-pressure torsion (HPT) [14,15,16,17], twist extrusion (TE) [18,19,20,21], accumulative roll-bonding (ARB) [22] and ECAP [12,23,24,25] Among these processes, the most applicable of them is ECAP, which allows for extremely large magnitudes of strain to be applied to a bulk sample through intensive simple shear; ECAP is highly capable and efficient in fabricating different types of UFG and nanostructured materials (NS) [26,27,28,29]. Of its relative simplicity and its ability to produce large amount of material, ECAP is an available candidate for further utilization and deployment in industry [31]
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