Prediction of the Stress-Strain Response of the Ultrafine-Grained Materials Using Multi-Scale Analysis

There are several severe plastic deformation processes that transform the material from microsized grains to the nanosized grains under large deformations. The grain size of a macrostructure is generally 300 μm. Following severe plastic deformation it can be reached a grain size of 200 nm and even less up to 50 nm. These structures are called ultrafine grained materials with nanostructured organization of the grains. There are severe plastic deformation processes like equal angular channel, high pressure torsion which lead to a 200 nm grain size, respectively 100 nm grain size. Basically, these processes have a common point namely to act on the original sized material so that an extreme deformation to be produced. The severe plastic deformation processes developed until now are empirically-based and the modeling of them requires more understanding of how the materials deform. The macrostructural material models do not fit the behavior of the nanostructured materials exhibiting simultaneously high strength and ductility. The existent material laws need developments which consider multi-scale analysis. In this context, the present paper presents a laboratory method to obtain ultrafine grains of an aluminum alloy (Al-Mg) that allows the microstructure observations and furthermore the identification of the stress–strain response under loadings. The work is divided into (i) processing of the ultrafine-grained aluminum alloy using a laboratory-scale process named in-plane controlled multidirectional shearing process, (ii) crystallographic analysis of the obtained material structure, (iii) tensile testing of the ultrafine-grained aluminum specimens for obtaining the true stress-strain behavior. Thus, the microscale phenomena are explained with respect to the external loads applied to the aluminum alloy. The proposed multi-scale analysis gives an accurate prediction of the mechanical behavior of the ultrafine-grained materials that can be further applied to finite element modeling of the microforming processes.