An Investigation of Plastic Strain in Copper by Automated-EBSP

Abstract

This work describes the investigation of plastic strain in tensile deformed polycrystalline copper using the automated Electron BackScatter Pattern (EBSP) technique of electron diffraction in the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). A strong correlation was found between the known accumulated plastic strain in OFHC copper tensile specimens and quantitative measurements of intra-grain misorientation obtained from an analysis of automated-EBSP data.Previous works on strain measurement using EBSP analysis have focused on the influence of dislocation density on the intensity profiles of diffraction bands. It is known that for some materials, like copper, deformation strain produces highly organized dislocation structures and thus the dislocation density is very inhomogeneous on the sub-micron scale probed by EBSP. This suggests that plastic strain analysis using the EBSP dislocation density analysis route will be difficult to reliably implement in these materials.