New York Paper - Are the Deformation Lines in Manganese Steel Twins or Slip Bands? (with Discussion)

$1. Introduction.—Any given piece of metal is made up of a very great number of grains, usually microscopic, each of which is a perfect crystal save only in outward form, with cleavage planes of low cohesion, geometrically arranged quite as in fie familiar non-metallic crystals. The plastic deformation of such a mass occurs chiefly through the slipping of the crystalline blocks of which each grain is composed along these cleavage planes, causing steps called slip bands to form on a previously polished surface. In this slip, the metal immediately adjoining each of the cleavage planes along which the slip takes place is thought to pass extremely rapidly through a very mobile state into the amorphous state, in which it is harder than the remaining still crystalline metal between the amorphous layers thus formed along the slip planes. Whether the slip planes below the surface in ferrite can be detected by cutting, polishing, and etching sections is in dispute; but if this detection is possible at all, it is usually made impossible by heating the metal even gently. In short, the change along the slip planes does not persist through heating, and it is thought not to persist through time even at the room temperature, nearly all the amorphous metal recrystallizing. The network in Fig. 22 and the parallel N.-70-E. lines in Fig. 21 are slip bands in copper. When plastically deformed metal is heated, certain parts of certain grains may twin, that is, their component crystalline units may rotate into a position, or more exactly into an orientation, symmetrical with the initial orientation and hence with that of the remainder of that grain. As seen in a microsection of a metal the twinned areas usually have parallel sides. The existence of twinning is recognized in metallic sections either by the presence of such parallel-sided areas differing in brightness from the adjoining metal, especially when seen under oblique light after etching, or more surely by the zigzagging of the slip bands which form when twinned metal is itself deformed again. Hence the usual procedure in developing twins is to deform plastically so as to cause the twinning tendency; to heat so as to allow the tendency to assert