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Recovery, Recrystallisation & Grain Growth: How Can Grain Size Be Controlled?

Grain size and boundaries can be manipulated to control material properties. Reducing grain size simultaneously improves strength and toughness. Recovery removes defects like vacancies and dislocations without changing microstructure. Recrystallization replaces deformed grains with new undeformed grains through nucleation and growth, reducing strength but increasing ductility. Grain growth occurs at high temperatures, driven by reducing total grain boundary area to lower energy.

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52 views2 pages

Recovery, Recrystallisation & Grain Growth: How Can Grain Size Be Controlled?

Grain size and boundaries can be manipulated to control material properties. Reducing grain size simultaneously improves strength and toughness. Recovery removes defects like vacancies and dislocations without changing microstructure. Recrystallization replaces deformed grains with new undeformed grains through nucleation and growth, reducing strength but increasing ductility. Grain growth occurs at high temperatures, driven by reducing total grain boundary area to lower energy.

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taknev
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Recovery, Recrystallisation & Grain Growth

Most engineering materials are polycrystalline (many crystals). Grain boundaries are therefore an important feature of the microstructure. They can be manipulated to control the mechanical properties. For example, the strength increases as the grain size is reduced. Grain size refinement is the only mechanism which simultaneously improves the strength and toughness (i.e. the ability to absorb energy during fracture) of a metal. Most other strengthening mechanisms result in an increase in hardness and brittleness. Grain boundaries form easy diffusion paths. Thus, at high temperatures they weaken the material by permitting the easy diffusion of atoms resulting in creep. For elevated temperature applications large grains are preferable because they minimise diffusion and hence reduce creep! Turbine blades for severe applications are made as singlecrystals.

How can grain size be controlled? We have seen already that this can be done during the solidification stage using inoculants (i.e. to create more nucleation sites during solidification). An alternative method used widely is recyrstallisation. Recovery When a sample is heated from room temperature recovery occurs first. During recovery there is a change in the stored energy without any obvious change in the microstructure. Excess vacancies and interstitials anneal out. A small number of dislocations and the internal stresses which they cause are also removed. This gives a drop in the electrical resistivity but little change in hardness. Recrystallisation Heating to still higher temperatures can lead to recrystallisation. The number of dislocations decreases only a little during recovery and the deformed grain structure is largely unaffected by recovery. It takes the growth of new grains to initiate a much larger change, i.e. recrystallisation. Recrystallisation is a process by which deformed grains are replaced by a new set of undeformed grains that nucleate and grow until the original grains have been entirely consumed. Recrystallisation is usually accompanied by a reduction in the strength and hardness of a material and a simultaneous increase in the ductility. Thus, the process may be introduced as a deliberate step in metals processing or may be an undesirable by product of another processing step. The most important industrial uses are the softening of metals previously hardened by cold working, which have lost their ductility, and the control of the grain structure in the final product.

3s at 580
initial stage

4s at 580
partial recrystallisation

8s at 580
complete recrystallisation

15min at 580
grain growth

10min at 780
grain growth

What causes recrystallisation? During plastic deformation the material absorbs large quantities of energy. Most of this energy is converted to heat but some fraction (~1-5%) is retained in the material as defects - particularly dislocations. Cold working a piece of metal deforms the grains causing an increase in the material strength. The improved strength is due to the increase in the density of defects present and because the dislocations get tangled and can no longer move freely. Recovery removes some of the effects of deformation. If the density of defects remains high after recovery then new grains will nucleate and grow in regions of high dislocation density. The rearrangement or elimination of these dislocations will reduce the internal energy of the system and so there is a thermodynamic driving force for such processes.

There is a critical level of deformation below which there will be no recrystallisation at all. Recrystallisation and grain growth involve the movement of grain boundaries. Grain Growth Grain growth refers to the increase in size of grains (crystals) in a material at high temperature. This occurs when recovery and recrystallisation are complete and further reduction in the internal energy can only be achieved by reducing the total area of grain boundary. The term is commonly used in metallurgy but is also used in reference to ceramics and minerals. The boundary between one grain and its neighbour is a defect in the crystal structure and so it is associated with a certain amount of energy. As a result there is a thermodynamic driving force for the total area of boundary to be reduced. If the grain size increases, accompanied by a reduction in the actual number of grains, then the total area of boundary will be reduced. In comparison to phase transformations the energy available to drive grain growth is very low and so it tends to occur at much slower rates and is easily slowed by particles or solute atoms.

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