Investigations of mechanical properties of nanocrystalline (nc) materials are still in
interest of materials science, because they offer wide application as structural materials thanks to
their outstanding mechanical properties. NC materials demonstrate superior hardness and strength
as compared with their coarse grained counterparts, but very often they possess a limited ductility or
show low uniform elongation due to poor strain hardening ability. Here, we present the results of
investigation of the microstructure and mechanical properties of nc Pd and Pd-x%Ag (x=20, 60)
alloys. The initially coarse grained Pd-x% Ag samples were processed by high pressure torsion,
which resulted in formation of homogenous ultrafine grain structure. The increase of Ag contents
led to the decrease of the resulted grain size and change in deformation behavior, because of
decreasing of stacking fault energy (SFE). The samples with larger Ag contents demonstrated the
higher values of hardness, yield stress and ultimate stress. Remarkably the uniform elongation had
also increased with increase of strength.
