Orientation Independent and Dependent Subgrain Growth during Iso-Thermal Annealing of High-Purity and Commercial Purity Aluminium

The orientation dependence on recovery has been studied in cold-rolled and annealed polycrystalline high-purity aluminium (99.99 wt%), binary Al-0.25Mn and commercial purity aluminium. The growth mechanisms were found to be independent of the alloy system and the microchemistry only influences the coarsening kinetics. Orientation-dependent subgrain growth, mainly studied in high-purity aluminium and measured in lamellar bands of uniform orientation, occurs in three distinct ways, depending of the size of the local orientation gradients. Following the evolution in average subgrain size and boundary misorientation by detailed electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) characterization during annealing, it was found that the rate of subgrain growth in Cube- and Goss-oriented grains were faster than in the typical deformation texture components, particularly after an incubation time when discontinuous subgrain growth occurs. In commercial purity aluminium, general orientation-independent subgrain growth is faster than the orientation-dependent growth because more growth occurs in regions near high-angle grain boundaries separating differently oriented lamellar bands. It appears as if subgrains misoriented by more than 3.5 degrees have a growth advantage over less misoriented subgrains, typically in the interior of lamellar bands. While the average boundary misorientations are decreasing, the individual boundary misorientations are increasing.