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Review: Overcoming the paradox of strength and ductility in ultrafine-grained materials at low temperatures

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Abstract

Ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials with grain sizes in the submicrometer or nanometer range may be prepared through the application of severe plastic deformation (SPD) to bulk coarse-grained solids. These materials generally exhibit high strength but only very limited ductility in low-temperature testing, thereby giving rise to the so-called paradox of strength and ductility. This paradox is examined and a new quantitative diagram is presented which permits the easy insertion of experimental data. It is shown that relatively simple procedures are available for achieving both high strength and high ductility in UFG materials including processing the material to a very high strain and/or applying a very short-term anneal immediately after the SPD processing. Significant evidence is now available demonstrating the occurrence of grain boundary sliding in these materials at low temperatures, where this is attributed to the presence of non-equilibrium grain boundaries and the occurrence of enhanced diffusion along these boundaries.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by IISc-STC grant # ISTC0305 and a Seed Grant (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) to PK, in part by the NRF Korea funded by MoE under Grant No. NRF-2014R1A1A2057697 to MK and in part by the National Science Foundation of the United States under Grant No. DMR-1160966 and the European Research Council under ERC Grant Agreement No. 267464-SPDMETALS to TGL.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India

    Praveen Kumar

  2. Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, 133-791, South Korea

    Megumi Kawasaki

  3. Departments of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-1453, USA

    Megumi Kawasaki & Terence G. Langdon

  4. Materials Research Group, Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Terence G. Langdon

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  1. Praveen Kumar
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Correspondence to Terence G. Langdon.

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Kumar, P., Kawasaki, M. & Langdon, T.G. Review: Overcoming the paradox of strength and ductility in ultrafine-grained materials at low temperatures. J Mater Sci 51, 7–18 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-015-9143-5

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