Abstract
Structural changes during the deformation-induced synthesis of nanocrystalline Fe–10Cr–3Al alloy powder via high-energy ball milling followed by annealing and rapid consolidation by spark plasma sintering were investigated. Reduction in crystallite size was observed during the synthesis, which was associated with the lattice expansion and rise in dislocation density, reflecting the generation of the excess grain boundary interfacial energy and the excess free volume. Subsequent annealing led to the exponential growth of the crystallites with a concomitant drop in the dislocation density. The rapid consolidation of the as-synthesized nanocrystalline alloy powder by the spark plasma sintering, on the other hand, showed only a limited grain growth due to the reduction of processing time for the consolidation by about 95% when compared to annealing at the same temperature.
Highlights
In recent years, nanocrystalline (NC) materials are being widely investigated for their superior mechanical, physical, and oxidation resistance properties when compared to their microcrystalline (MC) counterparts [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The prominent peak of Al is observed in the X-ray diffraction (XRD) profiles, Fe and
A closer comparison of the XRD profiles suggests that the XRD peaks become broader and the peaks positions shift toward a lower diffraction angle with increasing milling time
Summary
Nanocrystalline (NC) materials are being widely investigated for their superior mechanical, physical, and oxidation resistance properties when compared to their microcrystalline (MC) counterparts [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. NC materials, such as Fe and Fe–Cr alloys, have been synthesized by several researchers [6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] using different methods, such as electro-deposition [19], severe plastic deformation [13], and powder metallurgy [14,15,16,17,18] Among these techniques, the powder metallurgy is widely used for the synthesis of the bulk NC materials [2,4,20,21,22] because it offers several advantages over other routes. The ball milling leads to a decrease in crystallite size, an expansion of lattice parameters and an increase in grain boundaries, excess free volume, and dislocations [4,21,22]
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