Quantifying the inter- and intra-granular stresses and their effects on deformation behaviors for the polycrystalline hexagonal beryllium by neutron diffraction

The internal stresses developing at different length scales play the important role in materials performance. This importance has been well recognized for the cubic metals, however, not for the hexagonal close-packed (hcp) ones. The present work investigates the intergranular and intragranular stresses in the polycrystalline hexagonal beryllium by neutron diffraction. The correlation between those internal stresses and the deformation mechanism is revealed, and the strain rate and temperature effects on those stresses are presented. A composite behavior of intergranular and intragranular stresses is observed, which can be significantly tuned by the temperature and strain rate effects. The intergranular stress and stored energy are large for the soft-oriented grains (SOGs), while the intragranular stress and stored energy are large for the hard-oriented ones (HOGs). Both of those stresses are significantly high for the dynamic strain rate while they are relatively low for the elevated temperature. The large internal stresses in the dynamically compressed specimen should be attributed to the large number of twins and high density of dislocations. Different HOGs-SOGs configurations are proposed on the light of those observations, which might facilitate the properties controlling and extend the application scope for the hcp metal beryllium.