Morphological and crystallographic anisotropy of severely deformed commercially pure aluminium by three-dimensional electron backscatter diffraction

The aim of this paper is to examine the morphological and crystallographic anisotropy that develops during high-pressure torsion (HPT) processing. Commercially pure aluminium was subjected to monotonic HPT deformation at room temperature. The microstructure and texture were studied by large-area electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) scans. Three-dimensional EBSD scans served to scrutinize the morphological anisotropy and local texture. It was observed that two distinct stages of grain fragmentation and saturation occur during processing. Grains exhibited an ellipsoidal shape rather than an equi-axed one. The major axes of the ellipsoids showed a favorable orientation at the steady-state stage: an almost 20° inclination towards the shear direction. The global texture was characterized by typical shear components of face-centered cubic metals at both stages. However, the local texture revealed a preferential fragmentation pattern in the first stage: orientations in the vicinity of ideal fibers became less heavily fragmented while non-ideal orientations broke up more severely. This phenomenon was linked with the lattice rotation required to bring an initial orientation close to a stable one. Although the texture weakened considerably in the fragmentation stage, the texture index did not further decrease in the saturation stage. Saturation of texture, grain refinement and formation of microstructure are discussed in the light of different microstructural coarsening mechanisms.