Recovery of Scratch Grooves in Ti-6Al-4V Alloy Caused by Reversible Phase Transformations

The deformation behaviors of Ti-6Al-4V alloy samples with lamellar and bimodal microstructures under scratch testing were studied experimentally and using molecular dynamics simulation. It was found that the scratch depth in the sample with a bimodal microstructure was twice as shallow as that measured in the sample with a lamellar microstructure. This effect is attributed to the higher hardness of the sample with a bimodal microstructure and the larger amount of elastic recovery of scratch grooves in this sample. On the basis of the results of molecular dynamics simulation, a mechanism was proposed, which associates the recovery of the scratch grooves with the inhomogeneous vanadium distribution in the beta-areas. The calculations showed that at a vanadium content typical for Ti-6Al-4V alloy, both the body-centered cubic (BCC) and hexagonal close-packed (HCP) structures can be more energetically favorable depending on the atomic volume. Therefore, compressive or tensile stresses induced by the indenter could facilitate beta ->alpha and alpha ->beta phase transformations, respectively, in the vanadium-depleted domains of the beta-areas, which contribute to the recovery of the Ti-6Al-4V alloy subjected to scratching.