Structural coarsening during annealing of an aluminum plate heavily deformed using ECAE

The microstructure and softening behaviour have been investigated in an aluminum plate heavily deformed by equal channel angular extrusion and subsequently annealed at 170 °C. It is found that at this temperature the microstructure evolves by coarsening with no apparent signs of recrystallization even after 2 h of annealing. Both coarsening and softening are rapid within first 10 minutes of annealing followed by a slower evolution with increasing annealing duration. Evidence of triple junction (TJ) motion during coarsening is obtained by inspecting the microstructure in one region using the electron backscatter diffraction technique both before and after annealing for 10 minutes. The fraction of fast-migrating TJs is found to strongly depend of the type of boundaries composing a junction. The greatest fraction of fastmigrating TJs is in the group, where all boundaries forming a junction are high angle boundaries. The fraction of fast-migrating TJs is significantly lower for junctions containing at least one low angle boundary.