The annealing behaviour of deformed cube-oriented aluminium single crystals

Single crystals of the {001}[100] cube orientation of a dilute single-phase AI-Si alloy have been deformed in plane strain compression at temperatures between 300 and 500 degrees C at strain rates between 0.5 and 50/s. The st ability of the cube orientation was found to be dependent on the deformatio n conditions, which is in agreement with previous work. The deformed crysta ls contained bands of subgrains of a range of sizes and misorientations. De tailed EBSD analysis of deformed and annealed crystals revealed a strong co rrelation between subgrain growth and misorientation, and analysis of the d ata enabled the mobility of low angle grain boundaries in the misorientatio n range 5-20 degrees to be determined in the temperature range 300-450 degr ees C. It was found that the boundary mobility increased with increasing mi sorientation up to similar to 15-20 degrees and thereafter reached a platea u. The activation energies of migration were consistent with control by lat tice diffusion of Si in Al and the activation energy was found to increase with increasing misorientation. (C) 2000 Acta Metallurgica Inc. Published b y Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.