Ultrafine Grain Evolution in Copper Alloys Induced by Mechanisms of Continuous Dynamic and Static Recrystallization

Abstract

New thermo-mechanical processes (TMPs) to produce ultrafine-grained copper alloys utilizing continuous recrystallization (cRX) were proposed. These methods stand on our hypothesis that the evolution of ultrafine grains can be evolved by a mechanism of cRX even during severe plastic deformation at ambient temperature. A TMP of warm compression of 10 to 20 % of Cu-1.7mass%Fe alloy followed by annealing was cyclically repeated. The slight reduction, low-temperature annealing and pinning of grain boundaries by precipitates efficiently impeded occurrence of discontinuous recrystallization (dRX). The evolved substructures with nodes of the Fe precipitates gradually changed to new grains surrounded by low- and high-angle boundaries with increasing number of the repeated processes. Ultrafine grains with average size of 0.7 m were successfully evolved. However, the onset of dRX triggered extended grain coarsening accompanied by grain-boundary migration under conditions of insufficient annealing temperature and large pass stain. Another TMP cycles of cold rolling and annealing also induced fine-grained structure of about 0.6 m. The above results improved that ultrafine grain refinement can be realized simply by a mechanism of cRX even in the metallic materials with low stacking fault energy.