Cold working and Annealing

Cold working is deformation carried out

under conditions where recovery processes
are not effective. Hot working is deformation
under conditions of temperature and strain
rate such that recovery processes take place
simultaneously with the deformation.
Structural changes during cold working of
polycrystalline metals and alloys
(1) Changes in shape and size of grains: The
equiaxed grains on deformation are elongated
in the direction of acting force i.e. stretched in
the direction of main tensile deformation
stress–say, in the direction of rolling or wire
drawing.
(2) Changes in orientation of grains:
Preferred orientation or texture of is the state
of severely cold worked metal in which
certain crystallographic planes of the grains
orient themselves in a preferred manner with
respect to the direction of the stress (or
maximum strain).
(3) Changes in internal structure of grains:
during cold working around 15% of the work
of the deformation gets absorbed in the
material (rest is lost as heat). This stored
energy is the form of energy of crystal
defects. Plastic deformation increases the
concentration of point defects. With increase
of cold working, the number of stacking-
faults increases, thus density of extended
dislocations increases. The number of kinks,
jogs, dipoles, prismatic loops increase. The
most important internal change of structure is
increase in density of dislocation from 106 –
108 cm-2 in annealed state to 1010 – 1012 by
moderate cold working.
Effect of cold work on properties
Cold working or strain hardening is the
increase in the stress required to cause further
slip because of previous plastic deformation.
This is an important industrial process that is
used to harden metals or alloys that do not
respond to heat treatment. It changes various
mechanical, physical and chemical properties
of metals and alloys.
With increase in amount of cold work,
Ultimate Tensile Strength, Yield Strength,
Hardness increases but ductily (elongation
and reduction in area) decreases. Cold worked
texture and mechanical fibering leads to
Anisotropy in in properties of materials. The
ductility and impact toughness is much lower
in transverse section rather than in
longitudinal section. As the internal energy of
cold worked state is high, the chemical
reactivity of the material increases i.e. the
corrosion resistance decreases, and may cause
stress corrosion cracking in certain alloys.
The rate of strain hardening (slope of flow
curve) is generally lower in HCP metals than
cubic metals. High temperatures of
deformation also lower the rate of strain-
hardening.
Annealing of Cold worked materials
In certain applications materials are used in
the cold-worked state to derive benefits of
increased hardness and strength. The cold
worked dislocation cell structure is
mechanically stable, but not
thermodynamically stable. It is necessary to
restore the ductility to allow further cold
deformation or to restore the optimum
physical properties such as electrical
conductivity essential for applications. The
treatment to restore the ductility or electrical
conductivity with a simultaneous decrease in
hardness and strength is Annealing (or
Recrystallization annealing). It is heating cold
worked metal to a temperature above
recrystallization temperature, holding there
for some time and then slow cooling.
The process of Annealing can be divided into
three fairly distinct stages (1) Recovery (2)
Recrystallization (3) Grain growth. There is
no change in composition or crystal structure
during annealing. The driving force for
recovery and recrystallization is the stored
cold-worked energy, whereas for grain
growth is the energy stored in grain
boundaries.
Recovery It is restoration of the physical
properties of the cold worked metal without
of any observable change in microstructure. It
is the Annihilation and rearrangement of point
imperfections and dislocations without the
migration of high angle grain boundaries.
Recovery is initially very rapid, and more
when the annealing temperature is high.
Electrical conductivity increases rapidly
toward the annealed value and lattice strain
measured using XRD is appreciably reduced.
Properties those are sensitive to point defects
are affected, and strength properties are not
affected. With increasing time at constant
temperature the recovery becomes slower.
The greater the initial cold work, the more
rapid is the initial rate of recovery. The rate of
recovery of fine grains is higher than that of
coarse grains.
Polygonization one of the recovery processes
which leads to rearrangement of the
dislocations, with a resultant lowering of the
lattice strain energy. It is a process of
arranging excess edge dislocations in the form
of tilt boundaries, and the excess screw
dislocations in the form of twist boundaries,
with the resultant lowering of the elastic
strain energy. Climb and slip of dislocations
are essential for polygonization. The presence
of solute atoms in a metal reduces the rate of
polygonization.
Recrystallization It is nucleation and growth
of new strain-free crystals from the cold
worked metal. Kinetics of recrystallization
resembles a phase transformation. Two
distinct nucleation mechanisms have been
identified. (1) Strain-induced boundary
migration, where a strain-free nucleus is
formed when one of the existing grain
boundaries into its neighbour, leaving a
strain-free recrystallized region. (2) new
grains are formed in the regions of sharp
lattice curvature through subgrain growth.
This seems to predominate at high strains,
with nuclei appearing at grain boundaries or
at inclusions or second phase particles.
Mechanical properties change drastically over
a very small temperature range to become
typical of the annealed material. Electrical
resistivity decrease sharply.
Factors influence recrystallization behavior
are (1) Amount of deformation (2)
temperature (3) time (4) initial grain size (5)
composition (6) amount of recovery or
polygonisation (7) Method of deformation.
Hence recrystallization temperature is not a
fixed temperature in the sense of a melting
temperature. It can be defined as the
temperature at which a given alloy in a highly
cold-worked state completely recrystallizes in
1h. The laws of recrystallization are: (1) a
minimum amount of deformation is needed to
cause recrystallization. (2) Smaller the degree
of deformation, higher the temperature
required to cause recrystallization. (3)
Recrystallization rate increases exponentially
with temperature. Doubling the annealing
time is approximately equivalent to increasing
the annealing temperature 10°C. (4) Greater
degree of deformation and lower annealing
temperature, the smaller the recrystallized
grains. (5) Larger the original grain size, the
greater the amount of cold-work required to
produce equivalent recrystallization
temperature. (6) The recrystallization
temperature decreases with increasing
impurity of motel. Alloying always raise
recrystallization temperature. (7) The amount
of deformation required to produce equivalent
recrystallization behavior increases with
increased temperature of working.
Solute and Pinning effects The impurity in
metal segregate at grain boundary and retard
the migrating boundaries during
recrystallization. This is known as the
solution drag effect. When fine second phase
particle (carbides) lies on the migrating
boundary, the grain boundary area is reduced
by an amount equal to cross sectional area of
particle. When the boundary moves further, it
has to pull away from the particle and thereby
create new boundary are equal to cross
sectional area of particle. This increases
energy and manifests itself as a pinning acting
on the boundary. Consequently the rate of
recrystallization decreases.
Grain growth It is uniform increase in the
average grain size following recrystallization.
The grain size distribution does not change
during normal grain growth. During
abnormal grain growth called secondary
recrystallization because the phenomenon
shows kinetics similar to recrystallization, the
grain size distribution may radically change
i.e. some very large grains present along with
the fine grains. The driving force for
abnormal growth is decrease in surface
energy. Solute drag and pinning action of
second phase particles retard movement of a
migrating boundary during grain growth as
well.

comparison of mechanical properties during

Recovery, Recrystallization and Grain
growth.

2.
Strengthening/Hardening
Mechanisms
As discussed in the previous section, the
ability of a crystalline material to plastically
deform largely depends on the ability for
dislocation to move within a material.
Therefore, impeding the movement of
dislocations will result in the strengthening of
the material. There are a number of ways to
impede dislocation movement, which include:
  controlling the grain size (reducing
continuity of atomic planes)
 strain hardening (creating and tangling
dislocations)
 alloying (introducing point defects and
more grains to pin dislocation)
Control of Grain Size
The size of the grains within a
material also has an effect on
the strength of the material.
The boundary between grains acts as a barrier
to dislocation movement and the resulting slip
because adjacent grains have different
orientations. Since the atom alignment is
different and slip planes are discontinuous
between grains. The smaller the grains, the
shorter the distance atoms can move along a
particular slip plane. Therefore, smaller grains
improve the strength of a material. The size
and number of grains within a material is
controlled by the rate of solidification from
the liquid phase.
Strain Hardening
Strain hardening (also called work-hardening
or cold-working) is the process of making a
metal harder and stronger through plastic
deformation. When a metal is plastically
deformed, dislocations move and additional
dislocations are generated. The more
dislocations within a material, the more they
will interact and become pinned or tangled.
This will result in a decrease in the mobility
of the dislocations and a strengthening of the
material. This type of strengthening is
commonly called cold-working. It is called
cold-working because the plastic deformation
must occurs at a temperature low enough that
atoms cannot rearrange themselves. When a
metal is worked at higher temperatures (hot-
working) the dislocations can rearrange and
little strengthening is achieved.
Strain hardening can be easily demonstrated
with piece of wire or a paper clip. Bend a
straight section back and forth several times.
Notice that it is more difficult to bend the
metal at the same place. In the strain hardened
area dislocations have formed and become
tangled, increasing the strength of the
material. Continued bending will eventually
cause the wire to break at the bend due to
fatigue cracking. (After a large number of
bending cycles, dislocations form structures
called Persistent Slip Bands (PSB). PSBs are
basically tiny areas where the dislocations
have piled up and moved the material surface
out leave steps in the surface that act as stress
risers or crack initiation
points.)

It should be understood,
however, that increasing the
strength by cold-working will
also result in a reduction in
ductility. The graph to the right shows the
yield strength and the percent elongation as a
function of percent cold-work for a few
example materials. Notice that for each
material, a small amount of cold-working
results in a significant reduction in ductility.
Effects of Elevated Temperature on Strain
Hardened Materials
When strain hardened materials are exposed
to elevated temperatures, the strengthening
that resulted from the plastic deformation can
be lost. This can be a bad thing if the
strengthening is needed to support a load.
However, strengthening due to strain
hardening is not always desirable, especially
if the material is being heavily formed since
ductility will be lowered.
Heat treatment can be used to remove the
effects of strain hardening. Three things can
occur during heat
treatment:
1. Recovery
2. Recrystallization
3. Grain growth
Recovery
When a stain hardened
material is held at an
elevated temperature an increase in atomic
diffusion occurs that relieves some of the
internal strain energy. Remember that atoms
are not fixed in position but can move around
when they have enough energy to break their
bonds. Diffusion increases rapidly with rising
temperature and this allows atoms in severely
strained regions to move to unstrained
positions. In other words, atoms are freer to
move around and recover a normal position in
the lattice structure. This is known as the
recovery phase and it results in an adjustment
of strain on a microscopic scale. Internal
residual stresses are lowered due to a
reduction in the dislocation density and a
movement of dislocation to lower-energy
positions. The tangles of dislocations
condense into sharp two-dimensional
boundaries and the dislocation density within
these areas decrease. These areas are called
subgrains. There is no appreciable reduction
in the strength and hardness of the material
but corrosion resistance often improves.
Recrystallization
At a higher temperature, new, strain-free
grains nucleate and grow inside the old
distorted grains and at the grain boundaries.
These new grains grow to replace the
deformed grains produced by the strain
hardening. With recrystallization, the
mechanical properties return to their original
weaker and more ductile states.
Recrystallization depends on the temperature,
the amount of time at this temperature and
also the amount of strain hardening that the
material experienced. The more strain
hardening, the lower the temperature will be
at which recrystallization occurs. Also, a
minimum amount (typically 2-20%) of cold
work is necessary for any amount of
recrystallization to occur. The size the new
grains is also partially dependant on the
amount of strain hardening. The greater the
stain hardening, the more nuclei for the new
grains, and the resulting grain size will be
smaller (at least initially).
Grain Growth
If a specimen is left at the high temperature
beyond the time needed for complete
recrystallization, the grains begin to grow in
size. This occurs because diffusion occurs
across the grain boundaries and larger grains
have less grain boundary surface area per unit
of volume. Therefore, the larger grains lose
fewer atoms and grow at the expense of the
smaller grains. Larger grains will reduce the
strength and toughness of the material.
4.

RECOVERY, RECRYSTALLISATION AND

GRAIN GROWTH
When metal is subjected to hot working and
cold working processes, plastic
deformation occurs which is an important
phenomenon. Plastic deformation of metal
distorts the crystal lattice. It breaks up the
blocks of initial equiaxed grains to produce
fibrous structure and increases the energy
level of metal. Deformed metal, during
comparison with its un-deformed state, is in
non-equilibrium, thermodynamically unstable
state. Therefore, spontaneous processes occur
in strain-hardened metal, even at room
temperature that brings it into a more stable
condition. When the temperature of metal is
increased, the metal attempts to approach
equilibrium through three processes:
(i) recovery,
(ii) recrystallisation, and
(iii) grain growth.
Fig. reflects the recovery, recrystallisation
and grain growth and the main
property changes in each region.
1. Recovery
When a strain-hardened metal is heated to a
low temperature, the elastic distortions of
the crystal lattice are reduced due to the
increase in amplitude of thermal oscillation of
the atoms. This heating will decrease the
strength of the strain-hardened metal but there
is an increase in the elastic limit and ductility
of metal, though they will not react the
values possessed by the initial material before
strain-hardening. No changes in
microstructure of metal are observed in this
period. The partial restoration of the original
characteristics, produced by reducing the
distortion of the crystal lattice without
remarkable changes in microstructure, is
called recovery. At the initial state, the rate of
the recovery is fastest and it drops off at
longer times at given temperature. Hence the
amount of recovery that occurs in a practical
time increases with increasing temperature.
The individual characteristic recover at
different rates and gain various degrees of
completion in a given cold worked metal.
2. Recrystallisation
Formation of new equiaxed grains in the
heating process of metal, instead of the
oriented fibrous structure of the deformed
metal, is called recrystallisation. The process
of recrystallisation is illustrated through Fig.
The first effect of heating of metal is to
form new minute grains and these rapidly
enlarge until further growth is restricted by
grain meeting another. The original system of
grains go out of the picture and the new
crystallized structure is formed in the metal.
Recrystallisation does not produce new
structures however it produces new grains or
crystals of the same structure in the metal. It
consists in having the atoms of the deformed
metal overcome the bonds of the distorted
lattice, the formation of nuclei of equiaxed
grains and subsequent growth of these grains
due to transfer of atoms from deformed to un-
deformed crystallites. Finer grains get refined
and acquire a shape resembling fibres. The
temperature at which crystallization starts,
that is new grains are formed, is called
recrystallisation temperature.
Recrystallisation temperature is also defined
as that temperature at which half of the cold
worked material will recrystallise in
60 minutes.
3. Grain Growth
On recrystallisation of metal, the grains are
smaller and somewhat regular in shape.
The grains in metal will grow if the
temperature is high enough or if the
temperature is allowed to exceed the
minimum required for recrystallisation and
this growth of grain is the result of a tendency
to return to more stable and larger state. It
appears to depend primarily on the shape of
the grain. For any temperature above the
recrystallization temperature, normally there
is practical maximum size at which the grains
will reach equilibrium and cease to
grow significantly. However, there are certain
kinds of abnormal grains growth in metal that
occur as a result of applied or residual
gradients of strain due to non-uniform
impurity distribution, and which permits
growing very large single grain in metal.
Critical Resolved Shear Stress
Crystalline materials tend to deform or fail by
the relative motion of planes of atoms under
the action of stress. This motion is induced by
the component of stresses acting across the
slip planes. The deformation process is a
collective motion of adjacent slip planes. But
all the planes do not start deforming
simultaneously. Rather slip starts from a
single plane and then other planes follow. The
first slip occurs when the shear stress across
the plane exceeds a certain value. This
threshold value is called Critical Resolved
Shear Stress.
Temperature and crystal geometry influence
the minimum stress required to cause the
shear. But when the temperature and crystal
geometry too is held constant and the crystal
is loaded, a new scenario emerges.
A pure crystalline solid, when pulled along
different orientations, requires different
amount of loads in each instance for the very
first slip to occur (though the stress required
for the planes to slip remains same). This
implies that the shear stress resulting from the
loading is heavily affected by the orientation
of the slip plane with the tensile axis.
To find a generalized mathematical
expression for the dependence of the load on
the orientation let us assume that a cylindrical
specimen of the crystalline solid is being
loaded with tension.
Critical Resolved Shear Stress
A: Cross sectional area of the
sample
φ: Angle between the tensile
axis and the normal to the
slip plane
λ: Angle between the tensile
axis and the slip direction.
P: Tensile load.
As the slip plane is inclined at an
angle(φ) with the tensile axis, the cross
sectional area of the slip plane will be A/cos
φ. Slip occurs on a direction which is
contained within the slip plane. The tensile
load will have a component along the slip
direction which will be responsible for the
shear stress developed on the slip plane. The
component of the load will be P · cos λ.
Shear stress on the slip plane along the slip
direction is given by
Shear stress = Load across the plane/Cross
sectional area
τ = P · cos λ/(A/cos φ) = (P/A) · cos λ · cos φ
P/A can be substituted for tensile stress (σ),
and the equation then becomes:
τ = σ · cos λ · cos φ
The term cos λ · cos φ is known as Schmid
factor (m).
 Slip Twinning
1. Different planes of
1. All atoms in one atoms moves fractional
block move over distances depending on
the same distance their distance from the
twinning plane.
2. Under
microscope, slip 2, It appears as broad lines
appears as thin (or) bands.
line.
3. There is very 3. Lattice orientation
little change in changes in the twinned
lattice orientation. regions.
4. It requires lower 4. It requires higher shear
shear stress. stress.
5. Occurs in metals
5. Occurs in metals having
having more
less number of slip
number of slip
systems.
systems.
In twinning each plane of atoms move
through a definite distance and in the same
direction. The extent of movement of each
plane is proportional to its distance from the
twining plane, as shown in fig. The distance
moved by each successive atomic plane is
greater than the previous plane by a few
atomic spacings. When a shear stress is
applied the crystal will twin about the
twinning plane in such a way that the region
to the left of the twinning plane is not
deformed where as the region to the right is
deformed. The atomic arrangement on either
side of the twinned plane is in such a way
they are mirror reflections of each other.
Twins are known as anneling twins when they
are produced during annealing heat treatment
and mechanical twins when they are produced
by mechanical deformation of metals.
Mechanism of twinning:
Partial dislocation line moves up (or) down
by one plane each time the twinning
dislocation goes round it. Twinning may be
caused by impact, by thermal treatment (or)
by plastic deformation