Correlation of Deformation and Recrystallization Textures of Rolled 70-30 Brass

THE etched microstructures of cold-worked alpha brasses, after reduc-tions in excess of about 20 per cent, exhibit dark lines or markings, which have been termed "deformation bands," "etch bands," and "strain markings." The terms will be used synonomously in this report. The markings are similar in their general appearance to etch figures found in cold-worked iron, aluminum and other cubic metals but in certain respects may differ noticeably. At reductions of from about 20 to 50 per cent in brass, they appear as straight dark lines of irregular spacing and at random directions in different grains, but apparently intimately associated with definite crystallographic planes, usually {111}, in each crystal. At higher reductions, the markings on the rolling plane tend to appear in a direction transverse to the rolling direction in all crystals but may bend away at considerable angles, particularly near grain boundaries. Samans,1 on the basis of X-ray and micrographic studies of two single crystals of brass, rolled to a 50 per cent reduction, showed that the lines of deformation were the edges of thin mechanical twins parallel to octahedral planes. Barrett and Levenson2-4 have made comprehensive studies of the deformation of iron and of aluminum. They show that in these two metals the deformation markings originate by division of the original homogeneous crystal into banded areas differing in orientation by an amount that increases with the degree of deformation. The markings thus cannot be twin bands, and Barrett, in a review of this subject,2 attributed Samans' results on brass to an accidental choice of deformation that left the bands in approximately a twinned relationship. On the other hand, Mathewson5 has suggested that in some cases mechanical twinning offers a better rationalization of the coverage of some (111) pole figures of worked brass than the assumption of band rotation into sym-metry positions. Considering next a deformed and annealed alpha brass, the most striking aspect of its microstructure is the multiplicity of twin bands.