Effect of preferential orientation on the annealing twins during the low temperature treatment in nickel

Abstract The influence of preferential orientation (namely cube texture) on annealing twins in a cold rolled (95% thickness reduction) pure nickel has been investigated during isothermal annealing at low temperature. The results reveal that the cube oriented grains in cube related twinning (CT) regions have larger average boundary migration rate in comparison with grains in non-cube related twinning (NCT) regions. However, the twin density is always lower in CT regions than that in NCT regions. This is contrary to the growth accident model that suggests that twin density was proportional to the grain boundary velocity and grain boundary distance. It can be interpreted by the fact of the selective nucleation and growth mechanism for cube oriented grains which are less dependent on annealing twinning during recrystallization. Furthermore, during grain growth the average length of annealing twin boundary segments has a significant increment, which is probably attributed to lengthening of low energy twin boundaries along with the migration of other neighboring boundaries.