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2.
Strengthening/Hardening Mechanisms
As discussed in the previous section, the ability of a crystalline material to plastically deform largely depends
on the ability for dislocation to move within a material. Therefore, impeding the movement of dislocations will
result in the strengthening of the material. There are a number of ways to impede dislocation movement, which
include:
Strain Hardening
Strain hardening (also called work-hardening or cold-working) is the process of making a metal harder and
stronger through plastic deformation. When a metal is plastically deformed, dislocations move and additional
dislocations are generated. The more dislocations within a material, the more they will interact and become
pinned or tangled. This will result in a decrease in the mobility of the dislocations and a strengthening of the
material. This type of strengthening is commonly called cold-working. It is called cold-working because the
plastic deformation must occurs at a temperature low enough that atoms cannot rearrange themselves. When a
metal is worked at higher temperatures (hot-working) the dislocations can rearrange and little strengthening is
achieved.
Strain hardening can be easily demonstrated with piece of wire or a paper clip. Bend a straight section back and
forth several times. Notice that it is more difficult to bend the metal at the same place. In the strain hardened
area dislocations have formed and become tangled, increasing the strength of the material. Continued bending
will eventually cause the wire to break at the bend due to fatigue cracking. (After a large number of bending
cycles, dislocations form structures called Persistent Slip Bands (PSB). PSBs are basically tiny areas where the
dislocations have piled up and moved the material surface out leave steps in the surface that act as stress risers
or crack initiation points.)
Heat treatment can be used to remove the effects of strain hardening. Three things can occur during heat
treatment:
1. Recovery
2. Recrystallization
3. Grain growth
Recovery
When a stain hardened material is held at an elevated
temperature an increase in atomic diffusion occurs that
relieves some of the internal strain energy. Remember
that atoms are not fixed in position but can move
around when they have enough energy to break their
bonds. Diffusion increases rapidly with rising
temperature and this allows atoms in severely strained
regions to move to unstrained positions. In other words,
atoms are freer to move around and recover a normal
position in the lattice structure. This is known as the
recovery phase and it results in an adjustment of strain
on a microscopic scale. Internal residual stresses are
lowered due to a reduction in the dislocation density
and a movement of dislocation to lower-energy
positions. The tangles of dislocations condense into
sharp two-dimensional boundaries and the dislocation density within these areas decrease. These areas are
called subgrains. There is no appreciable reduction in the strength and hardness of the material but corrosion
resistance often improves.
Recrystallization
At a higher temperature, new, strain-free grains nucleate and grow inside the old distorted grains and at the
grain boundaries. These new grains grow to replace the deformed grains produced by the strain hardening. With
recrystallization, the mechanical properties return to their original weaker and more ductile states.
Recrystallization depends on the temperature, the amount of time at this temperature and also the amount of
strain hardening that the material experienced. The more strain hardening, the lower the temperature will be at
which recrystallization occurs. Also, a minimum amount (typically 2-20%) of cold work is necessary for any
amount of recrystallization to occur. The size the new grains is also partially dependant on the amount of strain
hardening. The greater the stain hardening, the more nuclei for the new grains, and the resulting grain size will
be smaller (at least initially).
Grain Growth
If a specimen is left at the high temperature beyond the time needed for complete recrystallization, the grains
begin to grow in size. This occurs because diffusion occurs across the grain boundaries and larger grains have
less grain boundary surface area per unit of volume. Therefore, the larger grains lose fewer atoms and grow at
the expense of the smaller grains. Larger grains will reduce the strength and toughness of the material.
4.
When metal is subjected to hot working and cold working processes, plastic deformation occurs which is an
important phenomenon. Plastic deformation of metal distorts the crystal lattice. It breaks up the blocks of initial
equiaxed grains to produce fibrous structure and increases the energy level of metal. Deformed metal, during
comparison with its un-deformed state, is in non-equilibrium, thermodynamically unstable state. Therefore,
spontaneous processes occur in strain-hardened metal, even at room temperature that brings it into a more
stable condition. When the temperature of metal is increased, the metal attempts to approach equilibrium
through three processes:
(i) recovery,
Fig. reflects the recovery, recrystallisation and grain growth and the main property changes in each region.
1. Recovery
When a strain-hardened metal is heated to a low temperature, the elastic distortions of the crystal lattice are
reduced due to the increase in amplitude of thermal oscillation of the atoms. This heating will decrease the
strength of the strain-hardened metal but there is an increase in the elastic limit and ductility of metal, though
they will not react the values possessed by the initial material before strain-hardening. No changes in
microstructure of metal are observed in this period. The partial restoration of the original
characteristics, produced by reducing the distortion of the crystal lattice without remarkable changes
in microstructure, is called recovery. At the initial state, the rate of the recovery is fastest and it drops off at
longer times at given temperature. Hence the amount of recovery that occurs in a practical time increases with
increasing temperature. The individual characteristic recover at different rates and gain various degrees of
completion in a given cold worked metal.
2. Recrystallisation
Formation of new equiaxed grains in the heating process of metal, instead of the oriented fibrous structure of
the deformed metal, is called recrystallisation. The process of recrystallisation is illustrated through Fig. The
first effect of heating of metal is to form new minute grains and these rapidly enlarge until further growth is
restricted by grain meeting another. The original system of grains go out of the picture and the new
crystallized structure is formed in the metal. Recrystallisation does not produce new structures however it
produces new grains or crystals of the same structure in the metal. It consists in having the atoms of the
deformed metal overcome the bonds of the distorted lattice, the formation of nuclei of equiaxed grains and
subsequent growth of these grains due to transfer of atoms from deformed to un-deformed crystallites. Finer
grains get refined and acquire a shape resembling fibres. The temperature at which crystallization starts, that is
new grains are formed, is called recrystallisation temperature. Recrystallisation temperature is also defined as
that temperature at which half of the cold worked material will recrystallise in 60 minutes.
3. Grain Growth
On recrystallisation of metal, the grains are smaller and somewhat regular in shape. The grains in metal will
grow if the temperature is high enough or if the temperature is allowed to exceed the minimum required for
recrystallisation and this growth of grain is the result of a tendency to return to more stable and larger state. It
appears to depend primarily on the shape of the grain. For any temperature above the recrystallization
temperature, normally there is practical maximum size at which the grains will reach equilibrium and cease to
grow significantly. However, there are certain kinds of abnormal grains growth in metal that occur as a result of
applied or residual gradients of strain due to non-uniform impurity distribution, and which permits growing
very large single grain in metal.
Crystalline materials tend to deform or fail by the relative motion of planes of atoms under the action of stress.
This motion is induced by the component of stresses acting across the slip planes. The deformation process is a
collective motion of adjacent slip planes. But all the planes do not start deforming simultaneously. Rather slip
starts from a single plane and then other planes follow. The first slip occurs when the shear stress across the
plane exceeds a certain value. This threshold value is called Critical Resolved Shear Stress.
Temperature and crystal geometry influence the minimum stress required to cause the shear. But when the
temperature and crystal geometry too is held constant and the crystal is loaded, a new scenario emerges.
A pure crystalline solid, when pulled along different orientations, requires different amount of loads in each
instance for the very first slip to occur (though the stress required for the planes to slip remains same). This
implies that the shear stress resulting from the loading is heavily affected by the orientation of the slip plane
with the tensile axis.
To find a generalized mathematical expression for the dependence of the load on the orientation let us assume
that a cylindrical specimen of the crystalline solid is being loaded with tension.
Critical Resolved Shear Stress
As the slip plane is inclined at an angle(φ) with the tensile axis, the cross sectional area of the slip plane will be
A/cos φ. Slip occurs on a direction which is contained within the slip plane. The tensile load will have a
component along the slip direction which will be responsible for the shear stress developed on the slip plane.
The component of the load will be P · cos λ.
Shear stress on the slip plane along the slip direction is given by
P/A can be substituted for tensile stress (σ), and the equation then becomes:
τ = σ · cos λ · cos φ
Slip Twinning
1. All atoms in one block move over 1. Different planes of atoms moves fractional distances depending on
the same distance their distance from the twinning plane.
2. Under microscope, slip appears as 2, It appears as broad lines (or) bands.
Slip Twinning
thin line.
3. There is very little change in lattice
3. Lattice orientation changes in the twinned regions.
orientation.
4. It requires lower shear stress. 4. It requires higher shear stress.
5. Occurs in metals having more
5. Occurs in metals having less number of slip systems.
number of slip systems.
In twinning each plane of atoms move through a definite distance and in the same direction. The extent of
movement of each plane is proportional to its distance from the twining plane, as shown in fig. The distance
moved by each successive atomic plane is greater than the previous plane by a few atomic spacings. When a
shear stress is applied the crystal will twin about the twinning plane in such a way that the region to the left of
the twinning plane is not deformed where as the region to the right is deformed. The atomic arrangement on
either side of the twinned plane is in such a way they are mirror reflections of each other. Twins are known as
anneling twins when they are produced during annealing heat treatment and mechanical twins when they are
produced by mechanical deformation of metals.
Mechanism of twinning:
Partial dislocation line moves up (or) down by one plane each time the twinning dislocation goes round it.
Twinning may be caused by impact, by thermal treatment (or) by plastic deformation