Effect of strain path on grain refinement in severely plastically deformed copper

Grain subdivision was studied experimentally with orientation imaging for oxygen-free high-conductivity copper deformed to the same equivalent strains in equal-channel angular pressing (ECAP), route A up to two passes, and in cold rolling. Grain refinement was modeled using a recently proposed grain refinement model. The refined grain size was significantly smaller in ECAP than in rolling in both experiments and modeling. The result shows that it is the lattice rotation rate that is responsible for the differences.