Incremental Feeding High-Pressure Sliding for Grain Refinement of Large-Scale Sheets: Application to Inconel 718

This study updates a process of high-pressure sliding (HPS) recently developed as a severe plastic deformation process under high pressure for grain refinement of sheet samples. The updated version, which we call the incremental feeding HPS (IF-HPS), consists of sliding for SPD and feeding for upsizing the SPD-processed area so that, without increasing the capacity of processing facility, it is possible to cover a much larger area with an SPD-processed ultrafine-grained structure with a grain size of ~ 120 nm. For the IF-HPS processing, anvils with flat surfaces but without grooves are used in an unconstrained condition, and the feeding distance is set equal to the deformed width. A Ni-based superalloy (Inconel 718) is processed by the IF-HPS under 4 GPa at room temperature, and it is possible to obtain an SPD-processed sheet with dimensions of approximately 100 × 100 × 1 mm³. Strain distribution and evolution were examined by hardness measurement and simulation using a finite element method. Tensile tests were conducted using tensile specimens extracted from the IF-HPS-processed sheet. Advent of high strain rate superplasticity with the total elongation of more than 400 pct was confirmed by pulling the tensile specimens with an initial strain rate of 2.0 × 10⁻² s⁻¹ at a temperature as low as 1073 K. The formability of the IF-HPS-processed sheet was confirmed by successful cup forming. It was also confirmed that the restoration after the superplastic deformation was feasible by subjecting to conventional heat treatment used for Inconel 718.