PART VI - Deformation of Alpha CuAl in Stage I

OLIP-line observations on copper alloys, using the electron microscope, have been made by a number of workers,13 but this work has been confined to a brass. In a CuAl alloys Koppenaal4 and Koppenaal and Fine5 have made observations with the optical microscope and by the use of interferometry. They found that the observed slip step heights inside the Liiders bands accounted for only 42 pet of the total macroscopic strain. The suggestion was put forward that optically unresolvable slip in other parts of the specimen accounted for a major part of the macroscopic strain. This is surprising since it is known from other workers that slip in a brass is inhomogeneous; i.e., large amounts of slip occur on individual {lll) closelys paced than being shared by a large number of closely spaced planes. Furthermore, a brass and a CuAl alloys with high concentration of aluminum exhibit similar deformation characteristics and slip-line patterns. Prior to investigations into the behavior of copper and a CuAl alloys under reversed stresses in tension and compression, some preliminary experiments have yielded results which the authors think resolve this discrepancy, and throw some further light on the behavior of a CuAl in tension. An experiment was carried out on a 10 at. pet CuAl single crystal, of gage length 7.5 cm, diameter 3.1 mm, and orientation shown in Fig. 3 (inset), for the purpose of resolving the above discrepancy. The specimen gage length was electropolished for 10 min in a 50:50 orthophosphoric acid (SG=1.75)-distilled water system, with 2 v across the cell and a current density of 0.5 amp per sq cm. The cathode was made of copper. After a tensile strain of 0.067 ± 0.001, intense slip was observed over a length 2 cm of the gage length whilst the rest of the specimen was relatively undeformed. In the lightly deformed region, slip bands of mean width 20 /x were spaced about 1 mm apart on average. The transition from the heavily slipped region (usually called a Liiders band) to the lightly deformed region was gradual, the slip-band density increasing as the "Liiders band" was approached. In the latter, the slip bands became so close together that, to the naked eye, the specimen appeared to be continously slipped, and the typical microtopography of this region is shown in Fig. 1. Twelve electron micrographs were taken at random from replicas of the Liiders-band region, and the widths of the slip lines were measured. The slip lines account for an over-all tensile deformation of 7.0 ± 0.7 pet, after allowing for the lengths of the un-slipped regions, which is in good agreement with the macroscopic strain. The distribution of slip-line widths was also measured and is shown in Fig. 3. Since Koppenaal could not resolve slip lines with height less than 540A (limit of resolution represented by dashed line), then it was deduced that he could have measured only about 50 pet of the deformation within the 'Liiders Band'. It is concluded, contrary to the suggestion of Koppenaal,5 that virtually all the macroscopic strain is accommodated within the "Luders band" and that there is no need to invoke fine slip distributed uniformly over the gage length.