Institute of Metals Division - Latent Hardening and Secondary Slip in Aluminum and Silver

The flow stress in some latent slip systems of aluminum and silver crystals after various deformations in single slip was investigated by transverse compression and supplemented by experiments on overshoot of the compression axis and the stability of corner orientations. Work hardening was found to be remarkably isotropic, the ratio of the flow stress in the latent system to that in the primary system being between 1.0 and 1.3. The strain-rate dependence was not significantly larger in the latent system. This low anisotropy suggests that specific dislocation interactions are not the direct cause of work hardening. Either the obstacles are essentially impenetrable so that only their distance enters, or a fairly random distribution of dislocations of all systems is. in fact. formed during single slip. The latter seems to he excluded by the observations on the strain-mte dependence and on the amount of secondary strain. The amount of seconzdary strains occurring in single slip was determined by shape-change mensurements and by a new method connected with the latent-hardening experiments. It is definitely less than 1/300 times the strain in the primary svstem. WORK hardening is due to dislocation interactions; this is a hypothesis, and possibly the only one, on which all present work-harden ing theories agree. About a dozen specific interactions have been considered, and it is unlikely that any essential one has been missed. Different work-hardening theories differ to a large extent in the specific interactions which are deemed most important. The presence or absence of any particular interaction, and its degree, depend on the geometrical relationships between the two dislocations interacting. Let us enumerate some examples. Two dislocations may react, with a varying reaction energy, to form a third dislocation, and this reaction product may be sessile or glissile. Two dislocations may intersect and a jog may be formed on both, on one of them, or on neither; this jog may be sessile17Z or glissile and it may, if moved nonconservatively, lead to the production of vacancies or interstitials. Finally, a dislocation may bypass another one and thus interact only with its stress field. All these interactions depend on the specific relation between the Burgers vectors and line directions of the two dislocations. Any dislocation generated during plastic deformation of fcc crystals belongs to one of twelve slip systems. Taking any one dislocation, its relationship to each of the other eleven can fall, by symmetry, into one of only five classes. These relationships are enumerated in Fig. 1 and Table I. Each slip system is represented in the stereo-graphic projection by two triangles, namely those in one of which the specimen axis would have to lie if the specimen were to deform in single slip on this slip system in a given sense, in a tension test. Let us represent the primary slip system by the shaded triangles. The other slip systems are classified only with respect to their relationship to this primary system. The code letters (initials of established names* in German) are explained in Table I. Three specific interactions are also listed in cases where they may be strong: the product of a reaction, the formation of jogs in either system, and the elastic bypass stress. The last column relates to the types of experiments reported in this paper and summarizes their results. To decide experimentally between the relative importance of the various interactions one would like to produce a group of dislocations in one slip system and then measure the stress necessary to force another group of dislocations of a specific second system through them. Hopefully, one can produce the first set of dislocations by plastically deforming the specimen in single slip. Then one can try to achieve single slip in a specific, previously latent system and measure its flow stress. If it is different from the virgin flow stress, there has been "latent hardening". Some types of latent-hardening experiments will be discussed in the next section. The strain-rate and temperature dependence of the flow stress is an indication of the importance of dislocation intersections. By extending an investigation of this dependence to the latent systems, one can determine how much more important forest contributions are here. seeger3 has used the as-