Relative Stability of Cube Orientation in Single Crystal Aluminium During Deformation

The goal of the present study was to characterize the relative stability of near Cube, {001}〈100〉 orientations under plane strain deformation and then to validate the experimental observations with available deformation texture models. For the first part, single crystal exact Cube and Cube rotated along the rolling (RD), transverse (TD) and normal (ND) directions were deformed to approximately 25, 60 and 80 % reductions in the channel die and deformed samples were characterized elaborately by both bulk and microtexture measurements. A strong pattern emerged for relative Cube stability, stability increasing in the order of 5° TD–exact Cube–5° ND–10° TD–5° RD, a pattern relatively not affected by the extent of strain. The Cube instability was accommodated by the strain localizations and at the early stages the extent of micro-textural instability was reflected on the measured (from the deformation) textural softening. The rotation of the near cube was generally along TD, except for RD rotated Cube. Though classical full constrain Taylor model failed to capture the trends of both rotation and relative Cube stability, the Grain Inter-action (GIA)-Split-up method could capture both effects approximately. It should be noted that the matching of the experimental trends were approximate and with several subtle contradictions (for example, the GIA model predicted less stability for 10° TD over 5° TD, while experimentally the reverse was observed), but the overall method is far better than classical Taylor and indeed has shown the best results in the relative Cube stability during deformation.