The processing of metals through the application of severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques provides the potential for achieving exceptional grain refinement leading to ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials in bulk solids. These materials generally exhibit high strength but very limited ductility at room temperature (RT) leading to the so-called paradox of strength and ductility. The recent dev...

This study investigated the microstructures of pearlite and martensite transformed from ultrafine-grained austenite in 0.45C steel and Vadded 0.45C steel. The mean prior austenite grain sizes were refined to be 4.5 μm in the 0.45C specimen and 2.4 μm in the V-added 0.45C specimen through cyclic heat treatment of austenitizing and water quenching, i.e., repetition of martensite § austenite trans...

The accumulation of defects, and in particular He bubbles, can have significant implications for the performance of materials exposed to the plasma in magnetic-confinement nuclear fusion reactors. Some of the most promising candidates for deployment into such environments are nanocrystalline materials as the engineering of grain boundary density offers the possibility of tailoring their radiati...

Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) is a thermal analysis technique that measures the energy absorbed or released by a sample as a function of temperature or time. Analysis by DSC has wide applications for examining solid-state reactions and solid-liquid reactions in many different materials. Quantitative analyses of the kinetics of reactions may be assessed by reviewing the interrelation b...

The knowledge of the fracture of bulk metallic materials developed in the last 50 years is mostly based on materials having grain sizes, d, in the range of some micrometres up to several hundred micrometres regarding the possibilities of classical metallurgical methods. Nowadays, novel techniques provide access to much smaller grain sizes, where severe plastic deformation (SPD) is one of the mo...