Ultrafine-grained Al-Cu-Zr alloy with high-strength and enhanced plasticity

Abstract We study the effect of annealing followed by additional deformation on the mechanical performance of an ultrafine-grained Al-Cu-Zr alloy with a mean grain size of 300 nm. We show that elongation to failure can be notably increased by modification of the alloy’s defect structure and discuss this phenomenon in terms of interfacial dislocation emission and interaction of dislocations with grain boundaries in different states.