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Self-organization of Cu–Ag during controlled severe plastic deformation at high temperatures

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Abstract

Cu90Ag10 alloys were subjected to severe plastic deformation at temperatures ranging from 25 to 400 °C and strain rates ranging from 0.1 to 6.25 s−1 using high-pressure torsion. The deformed samples were characterized by x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, and atom-probe tomography. A dynamic competition between shear-induced mixing and thermally activated decomposition led to the self-organization of the Cu–Ag system at length scales varying from a few atomic distances at room temperature to ≈50 nm at 400 °C. Steady-state microstructural length scales were minimally affected by varying the strain rate, although at 400 °C, the grain morphology did depend on strain-rate. Our results show that diffusion below 300 °C is dominated by nonequilibrium vacancies, and by comparison with previous Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations [D. Schwen et al., J. Mater. Res. 28, 2687–2693 (2013)], their concentration could be obtained.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support from National Science Foundation (DMR 10-05813) to carry out this research. The APT was performed at the Northwestern University Center for Atom-Probe Tomography (NUCAPT), which is supported by the National Science Foundation’s MRSEC Program (DMR-1121262). The research at TUD and KIT was financially supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (HA1344/22-2). The Austrian Science Fund FWF within the project No T512-N20 is thankfully acknowledged for supporting D.S.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, USA

    Salman N. Arshad, Timothy G. Lach, Pascal Bellon, Shen J. Dillon & Robert S. Averback

  2. Department of Chemistry, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, 54792, Pakistan

    Salman N. Arshad

  3. Institute for Nanotechnology, Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), 76344, Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

    Julia Ivanisenko

  4. Department of Physics, University of Vienna, A-1090, Vienna, Austria

    Daria Setman

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  1. Salman N. Arshad
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Correspondence to Shen J. Dillon.

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Arshad, S.N., Lach, T.G., Ivanisenko, J. et al. Self-organization of Cu–Ag during controlled severe plastic deformation at high temperatures. Journal of Materials Research 30, 1943–1956 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2015.119

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