The Effect of Grain Size Distribution on the Mechanical Properties ofNanometals

摘要

Predicting the properties of a material from knowledge of the internal microstructures is attracting significant interest in the fields of materials design and engineering. The most commonly used expression, known as Hall-Petch Relationship (HPR), reports on the relationship between the flow stress and the average grain size. However, there is much evidence that other statistical information that the grain size distribution in materials may have significant impact on the mechanical properties. These could even be more pronounced in the case of grains of the nanometer size, where the HPR is no longer valid and the Reverse-HPR is more applicable. This paper proposes a statistical model for the relationship between flow stress and grain size distribution. The model considered different deformation mechanisms and was used to predict mechanical properties of aluminium and copper. The results obtained with the model shows that the dispersion of grain size distribution plays an important role in the design of desirable mechanical properties. In particular, it was found that that the dependence of a material's mechanical properties on grain size dispersion also follows the HPR to Inverse-HPR type of behaviour. The results also show that copper is more sensitive to changes in grain size distribution than aluminium.