Internal Interfaces in Severely Deformed Metals and Alloys: Coupling of Kinetics, Structure and Strain with Properties and Performance

Abstract

Severe plastic deformation drives bulk materials far away from equilibrium and thus opens up a new opportunity to explore hitherto uncharted regions of structure-property correlations with respect to grain size, strain and defect density under extreme conditions. This allows addressing long-standing issues in materials research, such as the validity of “effective temperature” concept and provides a set-screw for exploring the possible levels of defect design and property tuning by deformation processing. As a pre-requisite, basic issues concerning the interaction of defects of different dimensionality during deformation and their interrelation with fluxes of solutes or with segregation fields, resulting in chemo-mechanical coupling effects need to be analyzed quantitatively. In the following review, we address issues related to internal interfaces in severely deformed metals and alloys by highlighting recent observations.