Influence of outer corner angle (OCA) on the plastic deformation and texture evolution in equal channel angular pressing

Equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) is one of the most promising severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques for fabrication of bulk ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials. There are many factors influencing the ECAP process which consist of the ECAP die geometries, strain paths, processing numbers, frictional conditions, processing temperatures, materials properties and so on. In this study, a crystal plasticity finite element method (CPFEM) model was used to investigate the influence of outer corner angle (OCA) of an ECAP die on the plastic deformation and texture evolution during the ECAP process. The simulation results revealed that Ψ = 20° resulted in the optimal distribution of effective plastic strain in the deformed sample for a fixed die channel angle of 90°. It should be noted that the angle of Ψ ⩽ 30° lead to similar textures after ECAP due to the development of corner gaps. Therefore, this study can offer valuable guidelines for the design and fabrication of ECAP dies in the future work, particular from the view of texture evolutions.