Some aspects of the defect structure in an austenitic stainless steel

The analysis of stacking fault tetrahedra (SFT) in fatigued metals (1,2) is somewhat complicated, due partly to their relatively low density, but principally to the presence of a very high density of dislocations which hides them. In order to overcome this second difficulty, we have used in this work an austenitic stainless steel that deforms in a planar mode and, as expected, examination of the substructure revealed planar arrays of dislocation dipoles rather than the cellular structures which appear both in single and polycrystals of cyclically deformed copper and silver. This more uniform distribution of dislocations allows a better identification of the SFT.The samples were fatigue deformed at the constant total strain amplitude Δε = 0.025 for 5 cycles at three temperatures: 85, 293 and 773 K. One of the samples was tensile strained with a total deformation of 3.5%.