Confined recrystallization of high-purity aluminium during accumulative roll bonding of aluminium laminates Paul Chekhonin a , Benoı ˆt Beausir a,b , Juliane Scharnweber a , Carl-Georg Oertel a , Tina Hauso ¨l c , Heinz Werner Ho ¨ ppel c , Heinz-Gu ¨ nter Brokmeier d , Werner Skrotzki a,⇑ a Institut fu ¨ r Strukturphysik, Technische Universita ¨ t Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany b Laboratoire d’Etude des Microstructures et de Me ´canique des Mate ´riaux (LEM3), UMR CNRS 7239, Universite ´ de Lorraine, I ˆ le du Saulcy, 57045 Metz Cedex 1, France c Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Werkstoffwissenschaften, Universita ¨ t Erlangen-Nu ¨ rnberg, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany d Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, D-21494 Geesthacht, Germany Received 9 March 2012; accepted 1 April 2012 Available online 10 May 2012 Abstract Aluminium laminates consisting of high-purity aluminium and commercially pure aluminium have been produced by accumulative roll bonding (ARB) at ambient temperature for up to 10 cycles. To study the microstructure and texture development of the high-purity aluminium layers with regard to the shrinking layer thickness during ARB, microstructure and texture investigations were carried out by electron backscatter diffraction and neutron and X-ray diffraction, respectively. While the commercially pure aluminium layers develop an ultrafine-grained microstructure, partial discontinuous recrystallization occurs in the high-purity layers. The texture of the high-purity layers mainly consists of Cube and “Tilted Cube” (tilted with respect to the transverse direction) components. The experimental results are discussed with respect to confined recrystallization in the ARB aluminium laminates. Ó 2012 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Aluminium; Accumulative roll bonding; Laminates; Confined recrystallization; Texture 1. Introduction Accumulative roll bonding (ARB) is a promising method for the production of ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials with grain sizes of <1 lm [1–6]. Due to their high specific strength, UFG sheets made by ARB have interest- ing mechanical properties. The relatively simple process allows the production of composites with sheets of different materials or ready-prepared sandwiches [7–19]. Because the geometry of the sheets does not change by applying ARB, any amount of deformation and any number of layers in composites can be theoretically achieved by this process. So far, the majority of research on ARB and ARB com- posites has been done on materials that do not recrystallize discontinuously during or after processing. To produce an UFG structure, discontinuous recrystallization is of course undesirable. Nevertheless, or even more because of that reason, the mechanism and kinetics of recrystallization have to be studied thoroughly. Several authors have analyzed the recrystallization in ARB composites during annealing [10,11,14,15]. However, in these investigations recrystallization was achieved statically and only a limited range of layer thicknesses was analyzed. Therefore, it is the objective of the present work to investigate multilayered sheets composed of two distinct materials. The first is com- mercially pure aluminium developing a refined microstruc- ture during ARB by continuous dynamic recrystallization [6]. The second is high-purity aluminium, which is known to show discontinuous dynamic recrystallization at ambi- ent temperature [20,21] and slightly elevated temperatures [22,23]. By applying up to 10 ARB cycles, layer thicknesses 1359-6454/$36.00 Ó 2012 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2012.04.004 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: werner.skrotzki@physik.tu-dresden.de (W. Skrotzki). www.elsevier.com/locate/actamat Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Acta Materialia 60 (2012) 4661–4671