Misorientations and geometrically necessary dislocations in deformed copper crystals: A microstructural analysis of X-ray rocking curves

Abstract

AbstractIn this study, the deformation-induced misorientations that are typically found in face-centred cubic single crystals deformed in single slip into stage II (and early stage III) of the work-hardening curve are discussed with respect to the experimentally observed broadening of X-ray rocking curves. By making use of well-established empirical relationships between characteristic features of the microstructure and the flow stress, some of the ambiguities of earlier interpretations of rocking curves could be avoided, and relationships between the half-widths of the rocking curves, the density of geometrically necessary dislocations, and the flow stress could be derived for both the tilt misorientations due to the kink bands lying perpendicular to the primary Burgers vector and the twist misorientations originating from the dislocation networks (grids, sheets) lying parallel to the primary glide plane. An evaluation of largely unpublished experimental rocking-curve data obtained on different crystallographic sections of deformed copper single crystals yielded a linear relationship between the broadening of the rocking curves and the flow stress. In terms of the predictions of the model developed, this implies that the ratio of the density of the geometrically necessary dislocations (that are responsible for the misorientations) to the total dislocation density remains constant during deformation, at least up to flow stresses of about 50 MPa. The absolute densities of the geometrically necessary dislocations are found to be a small fraction (at most ca. 5%) of the total dislocation densities. In terms of the evolution laws of deformation-induced dislocation boundaries proposed in the literature, it is concluded that both kink bands and grids/ sheets follow the characteristics of so-called geometrically necessary boundaries.