White beam microdiffraction experiments for the determination of the local plastic behaviour of polycrystals

The overall plastic behavior of polycrystalline materials strongly depends on the microstructure and on the local rheology of individual grains. The characterization of the strain and stress heterogeneities within the specimen, which result from the intergranular mechanical interactions, is of particular interest since they largely control the microstructure evolutions such as texture development, work-hardening, damage, recrystallization, etc. The influence of microstructure on the effective behavior can be addressed by physical-based predictive models (homogenization schemes) based either on full-field or on mean-field approaches. But these models require the knowledge of the grain behavior, which in turn must be determined on the real specimen under investigation. The microextensometry technique allows the determination of the surface total (i.e. plastic + elastic) strain field with a micrometric spatial resolution. On the other hand, the white beam X-ray microdiffraction technique developed recently at the Advanced Light Source enables the determination of the elastic strain with the same spatial resolution. For polycrystalline materials with grain size of about 10 micrometers, a complete intragranular mechanical characterization can thus be performed by coupling these two techniques. The very first results obtained on plastically deformed copper and zirconium specimens are presented.