Effects of recovery treatment after large strain on the grain boundary character distributions of subsequently cold rolled and annealed Pb–Ca–Sn–Al alloy

Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) measurements showed that recovery treatment of 250 °C/15 min after large strain of 90% cold rolling (thickness reduction) can promote the formation of special boundaries in Pb–Ca–Sn–Al alloy during subsequent moderate cold rolling followed by high temperature annealing, recovery treatments of shorter or longer duration at this temperature have no such effect. Orientation distribution function (ODF), general misorientation and kernel average misorientation (KAM) analyses indicated very strong texture of single S component and specific dislocation configuration in recovered microstructure are probably the key factors of the effect. High-resolution electron backscatter diffraction (HR-EBSD) analysis revealed that the formation, migration and interactions of incoherent Σ3 boundaries might be the mechanism of the effect.