Effect of stress path on the miniaturization size effect for nickel polycrystals

•Softening of mechanical behavior due to miniaturization is analyzed.•Different stress paths are employed.•Hall–Petch relationship is investigated for different stress paths.•Results show that the miniaturization softening is linked to triaxiality.

The mechanical behavior of metallic materials deeply depends on the size of samples. For specimen dimensions decreasing from a few millimeters to a few micrometers, the general observed trend is a softening of the mechanical behavior in tension which affects the stress level and the strain hardening. The objective of this work is to provide new experimental results in order to analyze the miniaturization size effects for various stress paths without strain gradients across the thickness of the samples. To this aim, experimental tensile tests, large tensile tests and shear tests have been performed on Ni sheets with various grain sizes. Results show that the miniaturization softening is affected by triaxiality, the larger is this parameter, the lower is the mechanical softening. These features seem to be linked to surface effects which are larger for low triaxiality stress paths. From an industrial point of view, it is hence possible to improve the forming of microparts using suitable stress paths.