Creep Deformation and Dynamic Grain Growth in an Interstitial-Free Steel

Dynamic grain growth is demonstrated to be much faster than static grain growth in a body-centered-cubic, interstitial-free steel sheet material at 850\(\,^\circ {\rm{C}}\). Dynamic grain growth occurs during concurrent plastic deformation at elevated temperature, whereas static grain growth occurs during static annealing. Grain growth during steady-state plastic flow in tension at 850\(\,^\circ {\rm{C}}\) to a true strain of 0.2 at a true-strain rate of \(10^{-4}\) \({\rm{s}}^{-1}\) doubled grain size, while static annealing for the same time produced no increase in grain size. This is described as dynamic normal grain growth (DNGG) because no abnormally large grains were observed. The recrystallized microstructure of the steel demonstrated a log-normal distribution of grain sizes. DNGG produced bimodal grain size distributions that deviate from the theoretical expectation of a simple shift to larger sizes during normal growth. The bimodal distributions contained a remnant of small grains that were not consumed during grain growth. DNGG produced a crystallographic texture that is unique from both the recrystallized material and that produced by lattice rotation alone. DNGG strengthened the \(\{111\} \langle 110 \rangle \) and \(\{111\} \langle 112 \rangle \) components of the strong \(\gamma \)-fiber component in the original recrystallization texture. Lattice rotation from tensile deformation, by contrast, strengthened the \(\alpha \)-fiber components that intersect the original \(\gamma \)-fiber.