Orientation of recrystallization nuclei studied by 3DXRD

A critical point in the understanding of recrystallization textures is the development of crystallographic orientations of the nuclei. Here an issue, which has been debated much recently [eg. 1], is if nuclei have orientations identical to those of the deformation microstructures from which they originate or not.

Traditional nucleation mechanisms like strain induced boundary migration [2] and particle stimulated nucleation [3] operate with nuclei orientations identical to the “parent”deformation microstructure. This is also what is commonly incorporated in recrystallization modeling. However, a number of studies have found recrystallization nuclei in orientations that were not expected from measurements on deformed structures.

Some of these results are reviewed and discussed in this paper, and new in-situ results obtained by the 3 dimensional X-ray diffraction (3DXR) method are presented.