J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725
DOI 10.1007/s10853-012-6507-y
ULTRAFINE GRAINED MATERIALS
Twenty-five years of severe plastic deformation: recent
developments in evaluating the degree of homogeneity through
the thickness of disks processed by high-pressure torsion
Megumi Kawasaki • Roberto B. Figueiredo •
Terence G. Langdon
Received: 8 March 2012 / Accepted: 13 April 2012 / Published online: 28 April 2012
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract The processing of disks by high-pressure tor-
sion leads to an inhomogeneous distribution in strain with
a high strain around the perimeter of the disk and a zero
strain in the center. Despite this apparent inhomogeneity,
there are now many experiments showing that the hard-
ness values on the surfaces of disks gradually evolve with
increasing strain to give a reasonably high level of
homogeneity. Experiments were conducted to determine
whether this high level of homogeneity extends also
through the thickness of the disks or whether inhomoge-
neities occur in the axial direction. Results are presented
for high-purity aluminum and a magnesium AZ31 alloy as
two representative materials showing different hardness
characteristics.
M. Kawasaki  T. G. Langdon (&)
Departments of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering
and Materials Science, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1453, USA
e-mail: langdon@usc.edu
M. Kawasaki
Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Hanyang
University, 17 Haengdang-dong, Seongdong-gu, Seoul 133-791,
South Korea
R. B. Figueiredo
Department of Materials Engineering and Civil Construction,
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte,
MG 31270-901, Brazil
T. G. Langdon
Materials Research Group, Faculty of Engineering
and the Environment, University of Southampton,
Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Preamble
The symposium on Ultrafine-Grained Materials VII, which
formed part of the TMS 141st Annual Meeting in Orlando,
Florida, on March 11–15, 2012, was one of a series of
symposia organized every 2 years within the TMS annual
meetings. However, this meeting was significant because it
marked the twenty-fifth anniversary since the first attempts
were undertaken to evaluate the microstructures of mate-
rials processed through the application of severe plastic
deformation (SPD). As reviewed elsewhere [1, 2], the first
detailed scientific studies of SPD processes, and the first
incorporating scientific rigor, were conducted by Bridgman
[3, 4] in the 1930s and 1940s with classic experiments on
the procedure now known as high-pressure torsion (HPT).
Later, this was followed by the work of Segal et al. [5] in
the 1980s in the development of the principles of equal-
channel angular pressing (ECAP).
However, these early studies were devoted almost
exclusively to the mechanical characteristics associated
with the HPT and ECAP processes and it was only later,
with the classic work of Valiev and his co-workers in Ufa,
that modern microstructural analysis was used to evaluate
the microstructures of the materials processed by SPD and
to investigate their significance. This study began 25 years
ago, in 1987, and it led very quickly to an extraordinary
demonstration of low temperature superplasticity in an
Al–Cu–Zr alloy processed by HPT and having an excep-
tionally small grain size of 0.3 lm. The report describing
this study was submitted for publication on September 28,
1987, and the paper appeared in the scientific literature in
1988 [6]. This research, and the subsequent detailed
descriptions of experimental results in western journals
[7, 8], led to a widespread interest in the processing of metals
using SPD techniques and the subsequent development of
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SPD facilities in many laboratories around the world. This
area of research has grown over the last 25 years to the
extent that the Ultrafine-Grained Materials VII symposium
was easily the largest, in terms of the numbers of submitted
abstracts, of the many symposia held at the 2012 TMS
annual meeting. It should be noted that new developments
in this area include recent reports describing the innovation
potential of SPD processing and the opportunities for
developing new approaches in SPD technology [9, 10].
It was recognized in the earliest research on SPD that
the strain imposed on the disks in HPT processing varied
from a maximum at the outer edge of the disk to zero strain
at the disk center. This recognition led to several evalua-
tions of the development of microhardness and micro-
structure across the planes of the HPT disks [11–18] but
these measurements were taken exclusively on, or very
close to, the disk surfaces and there were no parallel
investigations to determine the degree of homogeneity that
occurred within the thicknesses of the disks. Investigations
into the development of homogeneity or heterogeneity in
the axial directions of HPT disks have been undertaken
only very recently [19–21] and these investigations, toge-
ther with new experimental results, form the basis for the
present report.
Introduction
Processing by HPT is generally undertaken by placing a
thin disk between massive anvils, applying a high pressure
and then rotating one of the anvils so that the disk is
subjected to torsional straining. There have been some
limited attempts to apply HPT processing to larger bulk
samples, in the form of small cylinders [16, 22, 23], but
most investigations of HPT processing involve the use of
very thin disks.
In processing by HPT, it can be shown that the equiv-
alent von Mises strain, eeq, imposed on the disk during
torsional straining is given by a relationship of the form
[24–26]:
2pNr
eeq ¼ pffiffiffi ð1Þ
h 3
where N is the number of turns of the anvil, and r and h are
the radius and height (or thickness) of the disk, respec-
tively. It follows from Eq. (1) that the strain imposed in
HPT varies with the position on the disk so that it is zero at
the disk center where r = 0 and it reaches a maximum at
the outer edge. This significant variation in strain suggests
that the microstructures introduced by HPT are probably
highly inhomogeneous and it is reasonable to anticipate
that they will vary significantly as a function of the radial
position within each disk.
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J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725
Although Eq. (1) implies there will be gross inhomo-
geneities in the microstructures developed across the disks
in HPT processing, early experiments using microhardness
testing revealed a gradual evolution with increasing tor-
sional straining towards a reasonable level of homogeneity
throughout the disks [11–13]. It was shown also in these
experiments that this evolution occurred more rapidly with
increasing applied pressure, P, and/or increasing the
numbers of revolutions, N, in the processing operation [11,
12]. The general evolution towards a hardness homogene-
ity within the planes of the disks was later confirmed in
many experiments [27–39] and the evolution was
explained theoretically using strain gradient plasticity
modeling [40].
It follows from Eq. (1) that, although the strain may vary
within the sectional plane of the disk, it remains constant
along the axial direction within the thickness of each disk.
Accordingly, it was only very recently that experiments
were undertaken to make microstructural and microhard-
ness observations in the axial direction perpendicular to the
top and bottom surfaces [19–21, 41]. The present investi-
gation was initiated to review the information available to
date and to describe new results that provide a compre-
hensive description of the evolution of homogeneity or
inhomogeneity within the through-thickness direction.
Results for high-purity aluminum are described in the next
section and data for the magnesium AZ31 alloy are given
in the following section.
Experimental results for high-purity aluminum
Experiments were conducted on high-purity (99.99 wt%)
aluminum and some of the results were published earlier
[19]. The material was in the form of a rod with a diameter of
10 mm and it was annealed for 1 h at 773 K to give an initial
grain size of *1 mm. After annealing, the rod was sliced
into disks with thicknesses of *1.2 mm and then polished to
final thicknesses of *0.81 mm. These disks were processed
by HPT at room temperature (RT) under quasi-constrained
conditions [42–44] using an applied pressure of P = 6.0
GPa. The disks were processed for selected numbers of turns
ranging from 1/4 to 20 revolutions and the values of the
Vickers microhardness, Hv, were then recorded along the
diameters of the disks. The measurements were taken at
incremental distances of 0.3 mm with four individual values
recorded around each separate point at distances from the
selected point of 0.15 mm. These measurements were used
to plot the variation of hardness across each disk together
with the calculated 95 % error bars.
In addition, and in order to provide comprehensive
information on the variations of hardness within the
through-thickness of the disks, three separate disks were
J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725
prepared for each condition of HPT processing. These three
disks were used to take separate hardness measurements on
either the central plane of each disk or on planes within
*200 lm of the upper or top surface and the lower or
bottom surface after HPT processing, respectively. In the
following descriptions of results, the locations for these
three sets of measurements are designated upper, center,
and lower, respectively.
For the disks processed through 1/4 and 1/2 turns, the
hardness values were also recorded over the total planar
sections at the upper, center, and lower positions with
measurements taken following a rectilinear grid pattern
with a separation of 0.3 mm between each separate point.
These measurements were used to plot color-coded contour
maps that provide a simple visual representation of the
hardness distributions across the disk surfaces. The
emphasis was placed on producing color-coded maps for
the earliest stages of HPT processing because it has been
shown that these early stages are critical in determining the
overall behavior during HPT processing [34].
Fig. 1 Color-coded contour maps showing the distributions of the Vickers microhardness values at the upper, the center and the lower positions
of high-purity Al after processing by HPT through a–c 1/4 turn and d–f 1/2 turn [19] (Color figure online)
7721
Figure 1 shows the hardness values recorded over the
surfaces of the disks in the upper, center, and lower posi-
tions for HPT through 1/4 turn in Fig. 1a–c and through 1/2
turn in Fig. 1d–f. The results are presented as color-coded
maps with the colors representing values of Hv in incre-
mental steps of 5 as given by the color key on the right: in
these maps the parameters X and Y are two arbitrarily
selected but mutually perpendicular directions where the
position (0,0) corresponds to the center of each disk.
Inspection of these maps shows that the hardness distri-
butions are very similar at the upper, center, and lower
positions after 1/4 and 1/2 turns thereby confirming a
general homogeneity in the through-thickness direction.
Furthermore, the close agreement between each plane
demonstrates that the HPT processing was successfully
conducted without the occurrence of any significant slip-
page of the disks [45].
A full set of hardness measurements is shown in Fig. 2
for disks processed through (a) 1/4, (b) 1/2, (c) 1, (d) 5,
and (e) 20 turns where the lower lines at Hv & 20 denote
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7722 J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725

Fig. 2 Variation of the average Vickers microhardness recorded on the upper, center, and lower planes as a function of the distance from the
center of the disk after processing by HPT using an applied pressure of 6.0 GPa through a 1/4, b 1/2, c 1, d 5, and e 20 turns

the annealed condition prior to HPT processing and the
error bars show the 95 % confidence limits: an earlier
report provided detailed hardness measurements in the
unprocessed material and demonstrated there was no
significant variation in hardness prior to processing by
HPT [29]. For each plot, separate data are presented for
measurements recorded on the upper, center, and lower
planes in three different disks. From these measurements,
it is concluded that there are no significant variations
between the different sectional planes for disks of high-
purity aluminum processed through a wide range of dif-
ferent numbers of turns ranging from 1/4 turn to 20 turns.
It is also apparent that, although there are significant
variations in the hardness values as a function of the
positions on the disks in the early stages of processing,
these variations are essentially lost for the disks taken
through 5 turns and after 20 turns all three disks show
excellent agreement and a high level of homogeneity that

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J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725
extends both across each plane and in the through-thick-
ness direction.
The general variations in hardness which are visible in
the early stages of processing in Figs 2a–c are consistent
with expectations based on earlier results showing that
high-purity aluminum exhibits high values of hardness in
the central regions of disks processed through only 1 turn
[27]. A detailed description of these variations in hardness
in the early stages of HPT processing is beyond the scope
of this short report but a description may be found else-
where [19].
An alternative procedure for evaluating the through-
thickness variations in hardness, and therefore in micro-
structure, is to plot color-coded contour maps of one-half of
the cross-sections of disks processed under different condi-
tions. These maps are shown in Fig. 3 and they cover five
separate conditions from 1/4 turn (upper) to 20 turns (lower)
with the center of each disk lying on the left. Inspection of
these plots shows there are no significant variations in
hardness in the axial directions in high-purity Al. Up to 1 turn
it is apparent that there are regions of higher hardness but
these regions extend throughout the disks from the upper to
the lower surfaces. At 5 turns, there is a reasonable level of
through-thickness homogeneity and after 20 turns there is an
excellent homogeneity throughout the thickness.
The development of homogeneity after 20 turns is
consistent with earlier observations, using optical micros-
copy, where the flow patterns were recorded on the upper
Fig. 3 Color-coded maps showing the microhardness distributions
across the one-half cross-sections of high-purity Al disks after
processing by HPT through 1/4, 1/2, 1, 5, and 20 turns (Color figure
online)
7723
surfaces of disks of high-purity aluminum after different
numbers of rotational turns [19].
Experimental results for the magnesium AZ31 alloy
Magnesium has a hexagonal crystal structure and therefore
the numbers of active slip systems are limited. This means
that the processing of Mg alloys is often difficult so that
these and other similar metals are generally termed ‘‘dif-
ficult-to-work’’ materials [46].
The experiments were conducted using a commercial
extruded AZ31 magnesium alloy containing 3 % Al and
1 % Zn. An earlier report documented the hardness values
across an AZ31 disk in the unprocessed condition where
the average hardness was Hv & 55 and there was no sig-
nificant variation in hardness along the disk diameter [37].
Prior to HPT processing, the grain size was measured as
*9.4 lm. Disks were prepared for HPT and again these
disks were processed under quasi-constrained conditions
[42–44] either at room temperature (296 K) or at an ele-
vated temperature of 463 K. All processing was conducted
under an applied pressure of 6.0 GPa and further details are
given in earlier reports [20, 21]. Lines were scribed on the
two surfaces of each disk prior to straining and these lines
were used to check for the occurrence of any slippage [45].
Using this technique, it was confirmed that there was no
disk slippage in these experiments. Separate disks were
processed through 1/4, 1, and 5 turns and these disks were
then sectioned perpendicular to the upper surfaces for
microstructural observations and detailed hardness
measurements.
The appearance of the vertical sections cut through the
disks after processing at 296 K is shown in Fig. 4 for
torsional strains through (a) 1/4 turn, (b) 1 turn, and (c) 5
turns, respectively [21]. Variations in the grain structures
are visible in these vertical cross-sections and there is
evidence for the occurrence of different amounts of
deformation at different levels between the top and bottom
surfaces. This suggests the development of heterogeneities
within the microstructure after processing by HPT at room
temperature.
These heterogeneities are revealed more directly by
plotting color-coded maps for the one-half cross-sections as
shown in Fig. 5 where the maps correspond to 1/4, 1, and 5
turns after HPT processing at room temperature. These
maps demonstrate the occurrence of remarkable heteroge-
neities during HPT processing with higher hardness values
adjacent to the lower surface of the disk after 1 turn and
with a further enhancement in this heterogeneity after 5
turns.
To check whether these results are also typical of AZ31
disks processed by HPT at higher temperatures, Fig. 6
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Fig. 4 Flow patterns visible on the one-half cross-sections of disks of
the magnesium AZ31 alloy processed by HPT at 296 K for a 1/4, b 1,
and c 5 turns [21]
Fig. 5 Color-coded maps showing the microhardness distributions
across the one-half cross-sections of disks of the magnesium AZ31
alloy after processing by HPT at 296 K for 1/4, 1, and 5 turns (Color
figure online)
shows a similar set of color-coded maps for disks processed
by HPT at a temperature of 463 K [20]. As in Fig. 5, these
maps delineate the development of higher hardness values
adjacent to the lower surface of the disks after 1 and 5 turns
with correspondingly lower values of the hardness adjacent
to the upper surfaces. These results are consistent with
Fig. 5 and they confirm the development of a high degrees
of heterogeneity in the through-thickness directions of HPT
disks of the magnesium AZ31 alloy.
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J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725
Fig. 6 Color-coded maps showing the microhardness distributions
across the one-half cross-sections of disks of the magnesium AZ31
alloy after processing by HPT at 463 K for 1/4, 1, and 5 turns [20]
(Color figure online)
Discussion
The results from this investigation show there are signifi-
cant differences in the levels of homogeneity achieved in
two separate metals in HPT processing where these dif-
ferences appear to depend upon the crystalline structure of
the material.
Specifically, slip processes are easy in high-purity alu-
minum and the material exhibits excellent homogeneity in
the through-thickness direction at all stages of the HPT
processing. In the early stages of processing, up to 1 turn,
there are variations in the Vickers microhardness at different
positions on the planar sections of the disks but these vari-
ations are not reflected in the through-thickness direction
where, as shown in Fig. 3, there are no significant variations
between the upper and lower surfaces of each disk. Fur-
thermore, the microhardness results for high-purity alumi-
num become essentially homogeneous after 5 turns, as
shown in both Figs 2 and 3, and after 20 turns there is a very
high level of homogeneity throughout the disk. The results
are different for the magnesium AZ31 alloy where the
numbers of slip systems are limited and significant microh-
ardness heterogeneity is visible after 1 turn and after 5 turns
when processing both at 296 K in Fig. 5 and 463 K in Fig. 6.
These results demonstrate that aluminum and magne-
sium represent two extremes in terms of the development
of homogeneity in the microstructure and the microhard-
ness during HPT processing. These differences between
different materials must be considered in any future
attempts to develop a universal plot for the hardness vari-
ations in pure metals processed by HPT [47].
Very recent experiments have revealed the development
of unusual shearing patterns in materials subjected to HPT
processing including the presence of local swirls and
J Mater Sci (2012) 47:7719–7725
vortices that are indicative of the development of shear
velocity gradients between adjacent positions within the
disks [48–51]. However, the significance of these patterns
is not yet known and therefore it is not possible at the
present time to determine the significance of this effect in
achieving homogeneous microstructures.
Summary and conclusions
1. Experiments were conducted on high-purity aluminum
and a magnesium AZ31 alloy to evaluate the potential
for achieving a reasonable level of homogeneity in the
through-thickness direction of disks processed by high-
pressure torsion.
2. For high-purity aluminum, the results show there are no
variations in the microhardness in the through-thickness
directions in any disks processed between 1/4 turn and
20 turns. After 5 turns of HPT there is a reasonable level
of homogeneity throughout the disks and the overall
level of homogeneity is increased after 20 turns.
3. For the magnesium AZ31 alloy, the numbers of slip
systems are limited and the processed structures show
extensive heterogeneity in the through-thickness direc-
tions after processing by HPT through 1 and 5 turns. In
general, there is a tendency for high hardness values to
occur adjacent to the lower surfaces of disks when the
HPT processing is conducted either at 296 or 463 K.
Acknowledgements This study was supported in part by the
National Science Foundation of the United States under Grant No.
DMR-0855009 and in part by the European Research Council under
ERC Grant Agreement No. 267464-SPDMETALS.
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