Substructure and strengthening of heavily deformed single and two-phase metallic materials

Work hardening of single-phase crystalline materials (and to some extent, coarse two-phase and dispersion hardened mateRals too) at low temperatures results from the competition of two dynamic processes dislocation accumulation, during the long-range gliding of mobile dislocations and dynamic recovery, involving local rearrangements and length annihilation from mobile and stored dislocation interactions. Its complete understanding would be very useful for designing mateRals with maximized strength after heavy cold work. However, modelling of the strain-induced evolution of the dislocation substructure, an essential ingredient of any work hardening theory, is still far from satisfactory. On the other hand, some heavily deformed ductile two-phase in situ composites are 6nly second to whiskers among the strongest metallic materials. At first sight, tbe main obstacle geometry for dislocation glide in lamellar or multifilamentary in situ composites being clear-cut, it can be thought that their strength and work hardening are completely understood. However, this is not so and several schools of thought propose different interpretations for tbe exaggerated departure of the stress-strain curves of in situ composites from the rule-of-mixtures curves built from those of their bulk components. This paper aims to discuss such interpretations. The composite Cu-Nb is taken as model material owing to the extensive and