This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Ultrafine-grained Metals" that was published in Metals

Annotation Ultrafine-grained metallic materials produced by severe plastic deformation methods are at the cutting edge of modern materials science. UFG-metals exhibit outstanding properties which make them very interesting for structural or functional engineering applications. Fifteen articles in this special issue address a broad variety of topics: New developments in severe plastic deformation techniques, advances in modeling and simulation of the severe plastic deformation processes, mechanical properties under monotonic and cyclic loading of homogenous and graded UFG structures, dominating deformation mechanisms in UFG materials, advances and strategies for high conductivity UFG-materials, correlation between severe plastic deformation parameters and resulting materials properties and peculiarities in the corrosion behavior of UFG materials. The book covers latest results on ultrafine-grained titanium, aluminum and copper alloys and on UFG iron and steels and thus provides a deep insight to current research activities in the field of ultrafine-grained metals.

Proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Shaping and Forming Committee of the Materials Processing and Manufacturing Division (MPMD) and the Mechanical Behavior Committee (Jt. SMD/ASM-MSCTS) of the Structural Materials Division (SMD) of TMS (The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society) and held during the 2002 TMS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington February 17-21,2002.

This book focuses on the emerging class of new materials characterized by ultra-fine microstrucures. The NATO ASI which produced this book was the first international scientific meeting devoted to a discussion of the mechanical properties and deformation behavior of materials having grain sizes down to a few nanometers. Topics covered include superplasticity, tribology, and the supermodulus effect. Review chapters cover a variety of other themes including synthesis, characterization, thermodynamic stability, and general physical properties. Much of the work is concerned with the issue of how far conventional techniques and concepts can be extended toward atomic scale probing. Another key issue concerns the structure of nanocrystalline materials, in particular, what is the structure and composition of the internal boundaries. These ultra-fine microstructures have proved to challenge even the finest probes that the materials science community has today.

This book discusses results of the New Generation Iron and Steel Materials research project funded over the last ten years. It thoroughly describes theoretical achievements in ultra-fine grain steel and its refinement. It also discusses progress in related areas of engineering and technology. The author has been engaged in the research of new generation structural materials for the last twelve years being Chief Scientist of three national research programs in China.

Researches of the last years have allowed to establish that the laws of deformation and fracture of bulk ultrafine-grained (UFG) and coarse-grained (CG) materials are various both in static and in dynamic loading conditions. The influence of average grain size on the yield stress, the tensile strength, and the compression strength was established for metal alloys with a face-centered cubic (FCC), a body-centered cubic (BCC), and a hexagonal close-packed (HCP) structures. The study of the microstructure of the alloys after severe plastic deformation (SPD) by the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique showed the presence of a bimodal grain size distribution in the UFG alloys. Metal alloys with a bimodal grain size distribution possess a negative strain rate sensitivity of the yield stress and higher ductility at quasi-static strain rates. In this chapter, we will discuss the regularities of deformation at high strain rates, damage, and fracture of ultrafine-grained alloys.