Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350

www.actamat-journals.com

A microstructural study of the origins of c recrystallization

textures in 75% warm rolled IF steel
M.Z. Quadir *, B.J. Duggan
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Received 16 November 2005; received in revised form 3 April 2006; accepted 15 May 2006
Available online 1 August 2006

Abstract

IF steel was warm rolled at 700 C in a single pass. The resulting texture and microstructure were remarkably similar to those of the
same steel after cold rolling. A detailed investigation of the microstructure by orientation imaging microscopy and scanning transmission
electron microscopy showed microbands to have a mutual misorientation of less than 4 and shear bands to contain material misoriented
from the parent matrix by less than 10. Recrystallization did not occur preferentially at high-angle grain boundaries nor in shear bands.
Instead the recrystallization nuclei were conned in the original hot band grain envelopes in crystals belonging to the c ber. These c
deformed grains had systematically developed deformation bands which consisted of elements that had rotated by up to 30 about
the 1 1 1 parallel to the normal direction. This is essentially the same nucleation process as observed in cold rolled and annealed IF steel.
 2006 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: IF steel; Warm rolling; Shear bands; Deformation bands; Recrystallization

1. Introduction The formation of textures in steel, because of its techno-

Steel used for pressing motorcar body panels has chan-
ged over the past 20 years from the Al-killed variety to the
interstitial-free (IF) kind. The reason is partly economic:
the processing takes 50 h for Al-killed steels but only a
few minutes for IF steels; and partly technical: the form-
ability is not very sensitive to processing conditions for
IF steel, but is very sensitive for Al killed steels [1]. The
IF steels are so called because they contain strong carbide
formers, such as titanium and niobium, which getter the
nitrogen and carbon atoms from solid solution and instead
incorporate them into complex precipitates. These IF steels
can be processed in continuous rolling and annealing lines
which has allowed the successful processing of IF steel to
occur for a wide range of parameters, which leads to signif-
icant commercial advantage for IF steels over other low-
carbon steels.
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +852 2857 8615; fax: +852 2858 5415.
E-mail address: quadir@hkucc.hku.hk (M.Z. Quadir).
logical importance, has been continuously investigated
over many decades. Early work established that drawabil-
ity was directly linked to the texture and it was quickly
shown that for good drawability the steel should have as
high a proportion as possible of grains having a 1 1 1
direction parallel to the sheet normal direction (ND) and
as small a proportion as possible with 1 0 0 parallel to
the ND [2]. This particular type of texture responsible for
good drawability develops during recrystallization anneal-
ing from the rolling texture which consists of deformed
grains clustered into sets of orientations known as
a(1 1 0//RD) and c(1 1 1//ND) bers. These are routinely
formed at 8085% cold rolling reduction in industrial prac-
tice and can be most conveniently shown in the /2 = 45
section in Bunges version of Euler space [3] shown in
Fig. 1a.
The normal sheet-making route followed for drawable
sheets goes through a hot rolling stage in which the sheet
is deformed in the austenite state to give a random texture
before coiling and cold rolling, but in prize-winning work
Barnett and Jonas [4] showed that rolling in the ferrite

1359-6454/$30.00  2006 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.actamat.2006.05.026
4338 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
Fig. 1. /2 = 45 ODF sections of warm rolled (75% at 700 C) and annealed IF steels (intensity levels: 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11).
range at temperatures up to 700 C (i.e. warm rolling) also
produced well-developed a and c ber textures. Clearly,
annealing of material with these ber components should
produce drawable steel as it does in the cold rolled case,
and this proved to be true [5]. However, the scientically
exciting part of their work was that it considerably
extended the range of variables over which deformed and
recrystallized microstructures could be investigated in fer-
rite while keeping the textures unchanged. Critical metal-
lurgical factors such as strain rate sensitivity m and
dynamic strain aging were determined from room temper-
ature to 700 C and these were related to the microstruc-
tures and texture sharpness formed in an ultralow-carbon
steel (ULCS) and an IF steel. The work demonstrated that
for the ULCS, the value of m changed from negative to
positive as temperature increased beyond 320 C and the
texture was much sharper at temperatures in excess of
500 C than that found in IF steel at the same tempera-
tures. In contrast, the IF steel showed a slightly positive
value of m over a wide temperature range and formed
weaker textures, and this was linked to material instability
in the form of shear bands, which are narrow, plate-like
structures which cut the microstructure at 35 to the roll-
ing direction (RD) when viewed in the longitudinal section
and which carry a relatively large shear strain. These shear
bands, in the same way as shown earlier in rolled low stack-
ing fault energy (SFE) face-centered cubic (fcc) materials
[6], were claimed to be responsible for generating a weaker
texture than formed in ULCS. Furthermore since the IF
steel gave a better texture on annealing, the conclusion
was drawn, backed by some optical microscopy results,
that shear bands in the IF steel were the sites of {1 1 1}h k l
nuclei. Now this is not an unreasonable conclusion because
Duggan et al. [7] had earlier shown using transmission elec-
tron microscopy (TEM) that in Al-killed steel shear bands
did indeed provide nuclei of the orientation {1 1 1}h k l.
However, in later work, Tse et al. [8] showed that cold roll-
ing produced orientation splitting in a single grain to pro-
duce mutually misoriented large volumes of material
separated by either a sharp boundary or a more gently
curving transition from one orientation to the other. This
was shown to occur systematically and they called the pro-
cess deformation banding (DB). The deformation-induced
grain boundary they associated with nucleation of recrys-
tallization, and since DB occurred preferentially in crystals
belonging to the c ber, they proposed that {1 1 1}h k l
 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
originated from such sites. A link between DB and recrys-
tallization was not established at the time of the work of
Barnett and Jonas, i.e. 1997, and so the possible role of
DB in the recrystallization texture formation in IF steels
was not explored. This is the starting point for the present
investigation. It is clearly necessary to investigate whether
DB is as important in recrystallization texture formation
in warm rolled IF steel as it is in the cold rolled case [8].
The investigation involves orientation imaging microscopy
(OIM), TEM and scanning TEM (STEM) for microstruc-
tural characterization and uses conventional X-ray dirac-
tion (XRD) global orientation distribution functions
(ODFs) to cast new light on the subject of the annealing
of warm rolled IF steels.
2. Experimental
The material used had the composition 0.0043 wt.% C
stabilized by adding 0.057% Ti in the melt. The other impu-
rities were 0.006% P, 0.10% Mn, 0.035% Al, <0.01% Si,
0.002% N, 0.0065% S and 0.0031% O. The IF steel slab
was hot rolled to 70% reduction in three passes starting
at 1100 C. The exit temperature of the last pass was above
950 C. This resulted in randomly oriented grains with
70 lm average size which is about twice the grain size in
commercially produced steels. The sample was then
reheated to 750 C and allowed to cool to 700 C before
being rolled up to maximum 75% reduction in a single pass,
the maximum capacity of the rolling mill used. This high
reduction in a single pass was preferred, because if the roll-
ing was done in two or three passes it is inevitable that the
waiting period between exit and re-entry to the mill would
allow recovery and probably recrystallization to occur.
This would aect subsequent processing. The single pass
produced a material without any sign of recrystallization,
and the hardness of the warm rolled material was 172
VHN, which is to be compared with a value of 178 VHN
after cold rolling. High-temperature lubricant was sprayed
after each pass onto the rolls to keep the friction eect to a
minimum. Recrystallization annealing was done in an air-
circulation furnace preheated at 710 C which allowed
some minor grain growth to occur at longer annealing
times.
The global textures were measured using the Schulz
reection technique and Co Ka radiation to produce
1 1 0, 2 0 0 and 2 1 1 pole gures from which ODFs were cal-
culated using the BATE Textan-III software. For the SEM
study, longitudinal section (LS) and rolling plane section
(RP) were electropolished in an electrolyte having 9:1 vol-
ume ratio of acetic and perchloric acids at 30 V DC. Sam-
ples from the mid-thickness and away from the edges of the
sample were taken for all experiments to avoid depth-
dependent shear and plate widening eects. TEM foils were
produced from the LS by mechanical thinning followed by
electrolytic thinning using the standard window method.
The sample was observed using a JEOL-STEM FX2000
operated at 200 kV. Slightly convergent beam electron dif-
4339
fraction (CBED) was used to obtain diraction patterns for
orientation measurements. The foils used for TEM were
further observed with SEM to provide links between the
microstructures observed using these two techniques.
3. Results
3.1. Rolling and annealing texture
Fig. 1a shows the /2 = 45 section of Bunges Euler
space and the major orientation components along the a
and c bers. The global texture shown in Fig. 1b of 75%
warm rolled IF steel consists of these two bers. Annealing
of this material to complete recrystallization produced the
texture shown in Fig. 1c, with peak intensity close to
{5 5 4}2 2 5 and the almost complete annihilation of the
a ber components, except at the orientation {1 1 1}1 1 0
which is common to both a and c bers.
3.2. Deformed microstructure
3.2.1. Microbands and shear bands
Fig. 2 shows a low-magnication channeling contrast
(CC) image of the LS showing several grains. Grains C
and D are composed of microbands cut through by narrow
shear bands in a sense opposite to the habit plane of the
microbands. Such grains usually belong to the c ber.
Grains A and B belong to the a ber and show the charac-
teristic contrast associated with larger subgrains with small
mutual misorientations. Grain A has shear banding which
is rare in a ber grains, and grain B has no such features
which is much more common. There is evidence, given
the width of B, that this grain has undergone much higher
deformation than the imposed strain would indicate. Again
thinned grains such as B are common. Fig. 3 shows a
higher magnication image from a dierent position in
the same specimen and shows three grains, A, B and C.
The shear bands in grains B and C are very narrow,
0.5 lm or less. Observation of shear bands in the rolling
plane shows that these produce osets in the transverse
direction (TD), proving that there is a shear component
parallel to the TD. Another point of interest in this gure
is that the left-hand end of grain B has a-type contrast,
while from the center to the right-hand end a typical c-type
contrast is observed. It is possible that these are, in fact,
two dierent grains, but extensive use of OIM shows that
this is unlikely in the majority of cases. Considerable evi-
dence obtained from lower rolling reductions shows how
features such as this arise. Presumably, due to neighbor-
hood constraints or energy saving, one part of a grain
rotates towards one orientation and forms structures dier-
ently to other parts of the same grain which are rotating to
another orientation. This is evident in Fig. 4, which shows
a single grain after 25% single-pass warm rolling reduction
at 700 C. Clearly one part has a dierent microstructure
from the other, and this is undoubtedly the origin of what
is visible in Fig. 3. The boundary between grains B and C in
4340 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350

Fig. 2. SEM CC image of LS of 75% warm rolled IF steel showing several deformed grains with smooth and in-grain shear banded substructures cutting
through the microbands.

Fig. 3. SEM CC image of LS of 75% warm rolled IF steel showing the in-grain shear bands and their interactions with the grain boundaries.

Fig. 4. SEM CC image of LS of 25% warm rolled IF steel showing dierent substructures in dierent regions of the same deformed grain. This grain will
probably consist of at least two dierent orientations as the rolling reduction increases. This orientation splitting is what gives rise to deformation banding.
 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350 4341

Fig. 3 is not at, but wavelike; again this is common and
has been observed by Tse [9] after cold rolling IF steel to
85% reduction. It is also frequently observed in cold rolled
copper and a-brass [10] as well as in Al alloys [11] and is
therefore probably a general phenomenon.
Fig. 5a shows a TEM image of microbands observed in
LS. The CBED patterns from ve microbands are shown
in Figs. 5cg and the measured orientations are plotted on
a 2 0 0 pole gure in Fig. 5h. The orientation of microband
1 is (2.25, 2.81, 1.62)[2,1,1] and the lattices in the contigu-
ous microbands are rotated by a maximum of 6 3.65. The
traces of the microbands are along h3:91; 0:26; 0:73i
h1 0 0i. In turn, this lies on the (0 1 1) plane, which is a
body-centered cubic (bcc) slip plane. This is consistent with
the idea that the microbands are formed by slip processes, a
conclusion reached by Chen and Duggan in more extensive
work [12] and more recently by Halder et al. [13]. To make
the TEM results more statistically convincing the foil was
removed from the TEM instrument and examined using
SEM (Fig. 5b). It is clear that the microbands shown in
Fig. 5a are part of a large set contained within the same
grain and hence it is safe to assume that the TEM results
have some general validity, i.e. microbands extend across
the whole grain, a distance of 1020 lm, and have small
mutual misorientations.
Shear bands similar to those shown in the CC image in
Fig. 2 were then located and examined in a TEM thin foil.
Fig. 6a shows a typical example of two sets of microbands
making 30 to the RD. Fig. 6b shows higher magnica-
tion detail from Fig. 6a showing a shear band. In Fig. 6b
microband M1 is sheared to location M2, and this is
proved by the fact that the orientations of M1 and M2
are identical (2.58, 2.15, 2.15)[3.02, 1.44, 2.18] (Figs.
6c and e). S is rotated 7.46 away from M1 and M2 to
(2.3, 2.38, 2.24)[3.23, 1.23, 2.00] orientation (Fig. 6d).
This is a small rotation. Another example is shown in
Fig. 7 which has a pair of shear bands cutting through a
grain containing a single set of parallel microbands.

Fig. 5. (a) TEM image from the LS showing microbands. (b) SEM micrograph of the foil area shown in (a). (ch) CBED patterns and the corresponding
2 0 0 pole gure showing the orientations of microbands 15 labeled in the TEM image.
4342 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350

Fig. 5 (continued)

Sheared elements 1, 2, 3 have the orientation
(2.14, 2.92, 1.68)[3.15, 2.45, 0.23], and microbands
4, 5, 6 (2.06, 2.82, 1.92)[3.21, 2.37, 0.033] and 7, 8, 9
(2.02, 2.76, 2.06)[3.25, 2.31, 0.08], i.e. the shear band
material 1, 2, 3 is rotated 5 from 4, 5, 6 and 8 from
7, 8, 9. This small rotation was conrmed as the most com-
mon case from the larger area scans available using OIM.
Fig. 8 shows a CC and OIM image with the associated pole
gures for the whole area, together with the line scan
through ne parallel shear bands. The average misorienta-
 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350 4343

Fig. 6. TEM image of LS of 75% warm rolled IF steel showing the shear band cutting through one set of microbands while being parallel to another set of
microbands and the corresponding CBED patterns of sheared and unsheared material.

tion is 8 and is not simply related to any of the sample ref-
erence axes RD, TD, ND.
3.2.2. Deformation bands
Fig. 9 shows a CC micrograph taken from the RP sec-
tion at the mid-plane and the grain boundaries are outlined
black after observing at higher magnication. Grain X has
the characteristic contrast of grains belonging to the a
ber, which is veried by the pole gure shown in
Fig. 9b. It maintained a fairly constant orientation along
the line across the width of the grain. Grains Y and Z show
the more complex microstructures which are very widely
found in rolled IF steel. The line scans show, in each case,
the grain orientation {1 1 1}u v w to be rotated about
1 1 1 by 2030. In Y it is from Y1  {1 1 1}1 1 2
to Y2  {1 1 1}1 1 0 (Fig. 9c) and in Z from Z1
4344 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
Fig. 7. TEM image of LS of 75% warm rolled IF steel with the corresponding CBED patterns showing the magnitude of crystallographic rotation
produced by shear band material 1, 2, 3.
 {1 1 1}1 2 3 to Z2  {1 1 1}1 1 2 (Fig. 9d). This kind of
orientation rotation across a single grain, called by the
present authors deformation bands (DBs) and by others
[14] deformation-induced high-angle boundaries (DIH-
ABs), are commonly found in both warm and cold rolled
IF steel [8,15] and a model has been proposed for this pro-
cess [8]. Grain Y has a continuous orientation variation
from one side to the other, while Z has a relatively sharp
boundary. Such lattice curvature, i.e. either sharp or more
gentle across a grain, has also been observed in cold rolled
IF steel [8], and in fcc metals and alloys [16].
3.3. Recrystallization studies
The material was recrystallized to the 8% level at 700 C
and very large montages were prepared from both the LS
and RP sections. Fig. 10 shows a CC image of a represen-
tative area from the LS showing the variety of annealed
states in a stack of warm deformed hot band grains
observed in the partially recrystallized condition. Grain A
contains recrystallized grains of 39 lm in diameter
formed in a nely divided microstructure which is charac-
teristic of c ber material. The growth of these newly
formed recrystallized grains is observed to be within the
deformed hot band grain, i.e. they have not, at this stage,
grown through a preexisting hot band grain boundary.
Grain B contains obvious shear bands, indicated by arrows
and no obvious recrystallization is associated with them.
Instead, only minor spheroidization of subgrains has
occurred along the shear bands which is also true of grain
E. Inspection of Figs. 3, 5, 6 and 7 shows deformed c mate-
rial to consist of elongated microbands of 0.20.5 lm in
width, with occasional block type cells of 1 1 lm.
Annealing produces signicant changes in the elongated
 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350 4345

Fig. 8. SEM CC image with OIM and 2 0 0 pole gures of LS of 75% warm rolled IF steel showing the magnitude of misorientation created at the shear
band and matrix interfaces.

structure, i.e. the microbands are replaced by subgrains
ranging in size from 0.5 to 1.5 lm in diameter (Fig. 10).
It is arbitrarily assumed that subgrains of 3 lm diameter
or larger are either successful or potential nuclei. From
the montage of several hundred square micrometers, of
which Fig. 10 is a small part, a total of 428 such nuclei/
grains were found, their orientations being determined
and plotted on a 2 0 0 pole gure in Fig. 11. Some 84% of
these nuclei/grains had orientations belonging to the c
ber, with the highest concentration near {1 1 1}1 1 2
and {1 1 1}1 2 3. These orientations are clearly part of
the spread of the fully recrystallized texture shown in
Fig. 1c. Interestingly, at this stage of recrystallization, i.e.
8%, grains such as B with clear shear bands, provided
4346 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
Fig. 9. SEM CC image with corresponding 2 0 0 pole gures of RP section of 75% warm rolled IF steel showing orientation gradients across the grains
along line scans.
almost nothing to these data. Clearly, there is recovery in
grains such as B, but no recrystallization nuclei/grains were
found at this stage using the 3 lm criterion.
The LS montages gave very little systematic informa-
tion regarding nucleation of recrystallization because
the nucleation events were dicult to correlate with the
structures in which they had occurred. This was not
the case when the material was examined in the RP.
Figs. 12a and b show a CC image and the corresponding
OIM image of a deformed c grain neighbored by two a
grains, captured in the RP section of the same 8% par-
tially recrystallized material. The c grain at the middle
of the micrograph shows well-developed recrystallization
nuclei A, B and C growing into the surrounding mate-
rial. The overall texture is shown in Fig. 12c in the form
of a 2 0 0 pole gure. The orientations of the deformed
material 14 and the nuclei AC are labeled in the pole
gure corresponding to the labeling in the CC and OIM
images. Grain 1 is part of the a ber which has a spread
from near {4 1 1}1 1 0 to {1 1 2}1 1 0 and grain 4 is also
a, but part of a complementary set of orientations
spreading from {1 0 0}1 1 0 to {1 1 3}1 1 0. The c
microstructures 2 and 3 have two dierent orientations:
2 is close to {1 1 1}1 1 0 and 3 is close to {1 1 1}1 2 3.
From the OIM image it is very clear that the nucleation
events occurred in the deformation gradient formed in
the c-oriented material. The orientation of the recrystal-
lized grains A, B, C belongs to the orientation spread of
region 3, i.e. {1 1 1}1 2 3. This kind of nucleation in a c
grain showing a severe orientation gradient was system-
atically observed in many cases and is identical to the sit-
uation in cold rolled IF steel reported by Tse et al. [8]
and described there as nucleation in deformation banded
grains of the c family. During successive recrystallization
stages recrystallized grains grew within c deformed par-
ent grains and completed the recrystallization process
 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
Fig. 10. SEM CC image of LS at the 8% partially recrystallized condition
of 75% warm rolled IF steel.
Fig. 11. Orientations in 2 0 0 pole gures of partially recrystallized grains
at the condition shown in Fig 10 (1: {1 1 1}1 2 3; 2: {1 1 1}1 1 2). A total
of 428 new grains of minimum diameter 3 lm are included in this pole
gure.
by growing out of the hot band grain boundaries and
consuming the a deformed grains.
4. Discussion
4.1. Warm rolled microstructure and texture
The texture of 75% single-pass warm rolled material
contains a and c bers shown in the /2 = 45 ODF section
in Fig. 1b. This is almost identical to the cold rolled tex-
4347
tures measured after the same magnitude of reduction as
reported elsewhere [4,8]. Since the same textures are formed
in both cold rolling and warm rolling, and the strain rates
are 5 and 25 s1 [17], respectively, i.e. they dier by a fac-
tor of 5, it is plain that rolling texture formation is insensi-
tive to both of these variables.
The general microstructure formed in warm rolling is
very similar to that formed in cold rolled IF steel [9]. There
is a correlation between orientation and the deformed
microstructures, i.e. the a ber grains have characteristic
smeared contrast compared to the sharp and nely frag-
mented contrast of c grains (Figs. 2, 3, 8 and 9). The obser-
vation that a grains can be thinner than their starting grain
sizes was also reported in cold rolled IF steel. Chen et al.
[18] explained this phenomenon by reference to the number
of highly stressed slip systems, which is as many as 7 in a
orientations. From this they predicted a relatively homoge-
neous ow to occur in a grains during deformation. This
could also be the reason for the rather featureless appear-
ance of material belonging to the a ber. This featureless
appearance in SEM is actually a large cell structure when
examined using TEM in both warm [13] and cold rolled
material [18]. Sometimes the large cell structure is revealed
by a change in contrast in the a grain envelope, as in
Figs. 2, 3 and 9.
Microbands are the characteristic feature of c grains
(and a grains, if they are close to {1 1 0}1 1 2 [19]) and
are associated with less than ve slip systems, the number
known to be essential for homogeneous deformation. They
are volumes of material, relatively free of dislocations
enclosed by pairs of dislocation walls between 0.2 and
0.5 lm apart, which appear as parallel lines inclined
2535 with RD in the LS (Figs. 3, 5 and 6). There are
two basic models in the literature for microband forma-
tion, that due to Jackson [20] and Chen et al. [18], and
based on this work it is not possible to choose between
them. It is clear that the trace of the dislocation walls
shown in Fig. 5a is along [1 0 0], which is a direction in a
{1 1 0} plane and is therefore most probably the operating
slip plane. Data such as are shown in Fig. 5 have been
obtained in cold rolled IF steel and rigorously analyzed
by Chen et al. [18] and Halder et al. [13] who concluded
that microbands are a crystallographic phenomenon. This
view has recently been questioned by Hurley et al. [21], in
careful OIM work on Al0.13% Mg using two contiguous
surfaces, who concluded that microbanding is not a crystal-
lographic phenomenon. Be that as it may, the important
role of the microbands is that they constitute obstacles
against which dislocations pile up prior to the strain burst
which forms the shear bands [14].
The study of shear bands is emphasized in this investiga-
tion since they are obviously an important microstructural
element and play a vital role in the deformation process, in
both cold and warm rolled IF steels [4]. In this investiga-
tion shear bands are 0.20.5 lm thick, are generally con-
ned within a single grain boundary envelope and carry a
large amount of shear strain (i.e. a natural shear strain
4348 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350

Fig. 12. SEM CC image with corresponding OIM and 2 0 0 pole gure showing the formation of recrystallized grains in a deformation banded grain.

4.6 in Fig. 6) and appear to be crystallographic because
they are often formed parallel to a second set of micro-
bands where these occur (Fig. 6). The large strain they
carry is evident from the signicant osets created by shear
bands in the preexisting microbands and at grain bound-
aries where they terminate (Figs. 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8). Rare
examples of shear bands continuing across grain bound-
aries are between grains C/D in Fig. 2 and B/C in Fig. 3.
Shear bands normally cut one set of microbands in the
opposite sense to the RD (2535) and are usually absent
in the a oriented microstructure. There are signicant sim-
ilarities between microbands and shear bands at the rolling
reduction used in the present investigation, i.e. both
1. appear to be crystallographic and are conned within a
single grain envelope (Fig. 8a),
2. have a grain orientation dependency, i.e. they are found
in c grains and almost absent in a grains,
3. are similar in width to microbands,
4. appear to have a sheet-like structure, and
 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
5. are parallel to each other and are parallel to a second set
of microbands when they are present (Fig. 6a).
Therefore presumably the principal dierence between
them is the stage at which they were formed, i.e. micro-
bands were formed in the early stages of rolling and shear
bands were formed later when a c oriented grain is signif-
icantly work hardened by a series of parallel sets of dislo-
cation walls which comprise the microbands.
The orientation relationship between the shear band
material and the matrix in which they have been formed
is particularly important in regard to recrystallization.
Generally shear band materials were found to be 810
misoriented with the matrix material as measured by EBSP
of SEM and CBED of TEM (Figs. 68). In the TEM
micrograph shown in Fig. 6b, the microbands have rotated
3545 into the shear bands and are therefore expected to
have a crystallographic rotation of the same magnitude if
a rigid body rotation alone is involved. However the mea-
sured 810 misorientation implies that there is signi-
cant amount of slip involved in the deformation process
and a model for how this is achieved has been proposed
[22]. This small misorientation is eectively a low-angle
boundary between the shear band material and the parent
matrix.
4.2. Recrystallization behavior
Two factors are essential for successful nucleation: for-
mation of a mobile interface, which implies a critical mis-
orientation with the matrix being consumed; and a
driving force, which is usually related to the dierence
in dislocation density between the nucleus and its sur-
roundings. Boundaries lose their dislocation character
when the misorientation between two lattices reaches
1520, and this is also the misorientation required for
mobile interfaces. The shear bands have misorientations
of about 50% of these values and therefore are not
expected to be mobile. Of course these intermediate values
of misorientation can be increased by sub-boundary climb
during recovery, but this has to involve migration of the
interface as well. Representative grains containing shear
bands, such as is shown in Fig. 10, show evidence of
recovery, but there are no new grains, unlike the situation
in the grain above the shear banded grain. The fact that
setting a lower limit of 3 lm to capture nucleation events
meant that shear banded grains made almost no contribu-
tion to the data plotted in Fig. 11, indicates that they are
not eective nucleation sites. The reason why Barnett and
Jonas [4] concluded that shear bands gave rise to their
nal texture is that they used etched surfaces and optical
microscopy for their metallographic investigation. It
seems likely that the etch marks which covered c grains
are traces of microbands and shear bands, because the
intensity of the marks is far higher than would be
expected for shear banded grains [4]. The optical tech-
nique is also of lower resolution than the electron beam
4349
technique used here, where very ne details are revealed.
The conclusion is that shear bands in warm rolled IF steel
do not signicantly contribute to the formation of the
recrystallization texture.
Careful observation of large CC montages covering
many hundreds of square micrometers at the 8% recrys-
tallized stage showed almost no evidence at all of strain-
induced boundary migration (SIBM). The most likely
candidate orientation for this process is grains belonging
to the a orientation, for these are naturally low-energy
blocks. They do not provide nucleation sites at this stage,
but only recovered microstructures (Fig. 12). Since the
nal texture (Fig. 1c) shows only very low intensity along
the a ber, it is plain that a components are mostly con-
sumed by other orientations. Another factor that must be
borne in mind when considering the SIBM mechanism is
the fact that in IF steels there is good evidence that the
hot band boundaries are preferred sites for the nucleation
of FeTiP and MnS particles [23,24]. These, plus any sol-
ute segregation provides pinning or drag on such a
boundary, and SIBM has to overcome this problem. In
both this warm rolled and also in cold rolled IF steel
[9,15] there is abundant evidence that nucleation occurs
inside the original hot band grain enveloped rst, and
growth out of these does not occur until later, typically
at the 50% recrystallized volume fraction stage.
The two factors essential for successful nucleation, for-
mation of a mobile interface and a driving force between
the nucleus and its surroundings, are obviously met in
the deformation banded grains. The orientation gradients
measured across the rolling plane surface of c grains which
have DBs provide the necessary lattice curvature as is
clearly shown in Fig. 9. This is a result typical for both
warm rolling and cold rolling [8,15]. Further examples
are shown in recovered c grain material in Fig. 12 where
the rotation is from {1 1 1}1 2 3 to {1 1 1}1 1 0. Thus the
lattice curvature condition is met by the deformation band-
ing process, which is systematic and is always found in the
RP section in c grains. A simple model for deformation
banding in bcc metals is given by Liu and Duggan [25].
Information regarding the driving force, however, is lack-
ing in this investigation. However, early work on drawable
steels using XRD [26] and in later work in IF steel using
neutron diraction [27] showed that recovery processes
in both steels changed the as-deformed stored energy
relationships: EDef: Def: Recov:
f1 1 1gh1 1 0i hE f1 1 1gh1 1 2i changed to E f1 1 1gh1 1 0i i
ERecov: Def: Def: Recov: Recov:
f111gh112i and E f1 1 1gh1 1 0i hEf11 1gh1 23i to E f1 11gh1 1 0i iEf1 1 1gh12 3i .
If these inequalities hold true at the single-grain level, there
is therefore an internal driving force inside a single recov-
ered c grain which has deformation banded.
It is dicult in principle to know where a nucleation
event has taken place inside a three-dimensional object
using only two-dimensional sections, because what is
observed is a cross section of a developing crystal. Such a
crystal can grow in any direction until it is stopped, and
there is good reason to suppose that these new grains are
4350 M.Z. Quadir, B.J. Duggan / Acta Materialia 54 (2006) 43374350
stopped by grain boundaries. This fact has led to the
notion that the regions adjacent to grain boundaries are
actually the nucleation sites. This may well be so, but the
evidence for this must always be ambiguous when two-
dimensional sections are being examined. For example,
the new grains in Fig. 12 could be nucleated away from a
grain boundary or at a grain boundary above or below
the section being examined. Likewise the new grains visible
in Fig. 10 could be nucleated adjacent to the grain bound-
ary, or this could be a section along a line near the center of
the deformed grain in which the new grain grew upwards
or downwards to impinge the grain boundary. Therefore
it is concluded that DBs provide the necessary conditions
for nucleation of c oriented grains in c oriented material
but it is impossible to rule out near boundary nucleation
in the manner described by Senuma et al. [28] and Inagaki
[29].
At a later stage of recrystallization, new grains grow out
of the hot band envelopes to give the equiaxed structure
and consume the remaining a deformed hot band. A mech-
anism is outlined by Duggan and Tse for cold rolled IF
steel [30]. This happens when the new grains attain a criti-
cal length L, given by the SIBM formula [31] L P 2c/DE,
where c is the surface energy of the original grain boundary
and DE is the dierence in energy across the hot band grain
boundary. Of course, this is the simplest formulation, a
more realistic formula involving both solute drag and pin-
ning force has been given by Tse and Duggan [9] but this is
not discussed further here, since this work adds nothing to
the analysis. However, these terms have the eect of
increasing L to the order of 10 lm or more, and hence
the growing out of the nucleated grains occurs relatively
late, on average, in the recrystallization process.
5. Conclusions
1. The rolling and annealing textures of warm rolled IF
steel are very similar in terms of orientation and sharp-
ness to those of cold rolled IF steel at the same rolling
reduction.
2. Single sets of shear bands are commonly found but are
not eective in recrystallization because the shear band
material is misoriented 810 from its parent matrix,
hence forming a low-angle interface with the matrix.
3. The in-grain shear bands, which are similar to the
microbands in terms of geometry, alignment with sam-
ple axes and thickness, are predominantly formed in
deformed c grains.
4. DBs produce high lattice curvature which can be either
sharp or cumulative over several subgrain diameters and
are best observed in the RP section. The banded seg-
ments are of c orientation having a general rotation rela-
tionship around 1 1 1//ND and are eective sites for
nucleation of c recrystallized grains.
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the support of this work
by Grants Nos. CERG/HKU 7067/97E, 7323/98E and
7316/99E given by the Hong Kong Special Administration
Region of China.
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