Effects of grain size and dislocation density on strain hardening behavior of ultrafine grained AA1050 processed by accumulative roll bonding

Abstract In this work, the effects of grain size and dislocation density on strain hardening behavior of ultrafine grained (UFG) AA1050 produced by 9-cycle accumulative roll bonding (ARB) process were studied. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) micrographs indicated that UFG structure with the average grain size of 270 ± 11 nm achieved after nine cycles of ARB. The dislocation density which was measured by microhardness value increased with an increase in the number of ARB cycles. The dislocation density increased from about 7 × 10 12  m −2 for annealed sample to above 2 × 10 13  m −2 after nine cycles ARB. Tensile tests results revealed that with increasing the number of ARB cycles, mechanical properties of the samples improved. The Hollomon analysis was used to investigate the strain hardening behavior of AA1050 samples. The results showed that the strain hardening exponent decreased with increasing the number of ARB cycles. All ARBed samples showed high strain hardening rate in initial stage of deformation, which increased with increasing dislocation density and grain refinement.