Imposed stress and variant selection: the role of symmetry and initial texture

The paper discusses the role of stress on displacive phase transformations where plasticity is associated with variant selection, together with its implications for the resulting texture. In cases where the parent phase has a texture, the presence of stress generally leads to modification and strengthening of the texture in the product phase. However, if no preferred orientation is present initially, it is shown that the resulting product will be essentially free from texture irrespective of the applied stress. By analysis of the energy product of transformations under stress where the shape-change strain transforms as a second-order tensor, crystallographically indistinguishable orientations can give different energy products, while very different orientations can give the same energy product.