Strain rate sensitivity in commercial pure titanium: The competition between slip and deformation twinning

Titanium alloys are widely used in light weight applications such as jet engine fans, where their mechanical performance under a range of loading regimes is important. Titanium alloys are mechanically anisotropic with respect to crystallographic orientation, and remarkably titanium creeps at room temperature. This means that the strain rate sensitivity (SRS) and stress relaxation performance are critical in predicting component life. In this work, we focus on systematically exploring the macroscopic SRS of Grade 1 commercially pure titanium (CP Ti) with varying grain sizes and texture using uniaxial compression. Briefly, we find that Ti samples had positive SRS and samples compressed along the sheet rolling direction (RD) (i.e. soft grains dominant) were less rate sensitive than bars compressed along the sheet normal direction (ND) (i.e. hard grains dominant). We attribute this rate sensitivity to the relative activity of slip and twinning. Within the grain size range of ~317±7μm, we observe an increase in the rate sensitivity, where volume fraction of {101̅2}<101̅1>T1 tensile twins was low, and the twin width at different strain rates were similar. These observations imply that the macroscopic rate sensitivity is controlled by the ensemble behaviour of local deformation processes: the amount of slips accumulated at grain boundaries affects the SRS, which is grain size and texture dependent. We hope that this experimental study motivates mechanistic modelling studies using crystal plasticity, including strain rate sensitivity and twinning, to predict the performance of titanium alloys.