Part XII – December 1969 – Papers - On the Mechanism of Rotational Slip in Magnesium Single Crystals

A transmission electron microscope study was made of magnesium single crystals deformed in torsion using the basal pole as the forsional axis. While this type of deformation is predicted to result in the formation of hexagonal networks of screw dislocations, these networks were not observed. The basic dislocation arrangement consisted of arrays of nearly parallel and approximately equally spaced dislocations. The average dislocation density was over an order of magnitude higher than that required to account for the torsional deformation. The observed high rate of work hardening in these crystals is consistent with both their high dislocation densities and the arrangement of dislocations in pile-ups. The experimental observations are also in agreement with the assumption that dislocation sources are activated not only at the surface but at interior locations as well. In considering torsional deformation, Amelinckx and Dekeyser1 postulated that when a torque is applied to a crystal oriented with a glide plane normal to the specimen axis, deformation occurs by the following steps: 1) Nucleation of dislocation sources at or near the specimen surface in areas where the shear stress, resolved along a slip Burgers vector, is a maximum; 2) the screw orientations of the dislocations accommodating the twist move inwards towards the specimen center. If two glide directions lie on the glide plane, the geometry shown in Fig. 1 should result; 3) the screw dislocations that pile up in the central part of the specimen cross-slip to form a grid. At the same time, screws of opposite sign and most edges leave the specimen. Tinder,2 using zinc crystals twisted about the basal pole, independently reached essentially the same conclusions. He suggested a mechanism involving nucleation of ?(1120) screw dislocations at the six points of highest resolved shear stress that lie on the cross-section near the surface. Under the applied shear stress these dislocations were assumed to move inward and interact so as to form a hexagonal network of screw dislocations. Today it is often accepted that rotational slip occurs by a mechanism of the above type, but to our understanding this has never been experimentally proved. This paper reports an experimental study of rotational slip, using magnesium single crystals, that indicates that in this metal rotational slip does not conform well to this mechanism. EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES Mechanical Testing. Specimens with a (0002) axis were prepared from magnesium crystals of 99.95 pct purity grown by Jillson's3 modified Bridgman technique. The crystals were acid machined into cylindri-