Breaking the Trade-Off Relation Between Strength and Electrical Conductivity: Heterogeneous Grain Design
HOU Jiapeng, SUN Pengfei, WANG Qiang, ZHANG Zhenjun, ZHANG Zhefeng()
Shi -changxu Innovation Center for Advanced Materials, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China
Cite this article:
HOU Jiapeng, SUN Pengfei, WANG Qiang, ZHANG Zhenjun, ZHANG Zhefeng. Breaking the Trade-Off Relation Between Strength and Electrical Conductivity: Heterogeneous Grain Design. Acta Metall Sin, 2022, 58(11): 1467-1477.
The trade-off relationship between the strength and the electrical conductivity has been the bottleneck restricting the development of conductive metallic materials with high strength and high electrical conductivity. In this study, commercially pure Al wires and commercially pure Cu wires with various grain characteristics were prepared by the cold-drawing process to investigate the influencing mechanisms of grain on strength and electrical conductivity. Surprisingly, the synchronous increase in strength and electrical conductivity may be achieved both for the commercially pure Al wires and commercially pure Cu wires in the later stage of cold-drawing deformation, which shatters the traditional constrictive relationship between the strength and the electrical conductivity. Additionally, the microstructure investigation demonstrates that with the increase of drawing deformation, the axial grains were lengthened, the radial grains were increasingly polished, and the radial <001> texture was transformed to <111> texture. Finally, the heterogeneous microstructures, including heterogeneous grain formation and heterogeneous crystal orientation were formed. The theoretical analysis reveals that the grain width and texture mainly influence the strength, and the grain length primarily influences the electrical conductivity. Consequently, the axial long grain, the radial fine grain, and radial hard orientation texture are proved to be the primary mechanisms causing the synchronous improvement of strength and electrical conductivity of commercially pure Al wires and commercially pure Cu wires. This suggests that the heterogeneous grain design may be considered a useful method to create conductive metallic materials with high strength and high electrical conductivity.
Fig.1 Strength-electrical conductivity curves of the commercially pure Al wire (a) and the commercially pure Cu wire (b) with various area reductions (ε)
Fig.2 TEM images of the radial sections (a-c) and the axial sections (d-f) of the commercially pure Al wires manufactured with ε = 24.6% (a, d), ε = 83.1% (b, e), and ε = 90.2% (c, f)
Fig.3 TEM images of the radial sections (a-c) and the axial sections (d-f) of the commercially pure Cu wires with ε = 0 (a, d), ε = 42.7% (b, e), and ε = 79.7% (c, f)
Fig.4 EBSD images of the radial sections (a-c) and the axial sections (d-f) of the commercially pure Al wires with ε = 24.6% (a, d), ε = 83.1% (b, e), and ε = 90.2% (c, f)
Fig.5 EBSD images of the radial sections (a-c) and the axial sections (d-f) of the commercially pure Cu wires with ε = 0 (a, d), ε = 42.7% (b, e), and ε = 79.7% (c, f) (Insets in Figs.5b and c show the locally enlarged images)
Fig.6 Evolutions of the grain width and grain length of the commercially pure Al wires (a) and the commercially pure Cu wires (b) related to ε
Fig.7 Relations between the volume fractions of texture and ε of the commercially pure Al wires (a) and the commercially pure Cu wires (b)
Fig.8 Schematic of heterogeneous grain design principle for metallic metal wire achieving high strength and high electrical conductivity
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