Nano-enabled orientation alignment via extreme shear strains

It was recently shown that the crystals in an already nanocrystalline alloy (Pd–10% Au) became highly oriented under extreme shearing. No such self-ordering is seen in the coarse-grained counterpart under the same conditions. Here we use phase field dislocation dynamics and polycrystalline plasticity modeling to explore the possible causes that enabled this unusual crystallographic alignment. The results suggest that full-dislocation slip and preservation of grain boundary misorientation with at least one neighbor grain can cause the highly oriented texture observed experimentally.