A Portrait of Copper Processed by Equal Channel Angular Pressing

Abstract

Copper is one of the most important materials used for electrical connectors with a high thermal and electricial conductivity, and there is an ongoing demand to improve its mechanical properties without sacrificing other beneficial properties. A possible approach to achieving this aim is to use the method of severe plastic deformation to obtain an ultrafine grained microstructure. Significant grain refinement obtained by equal channel angular pressing (ECAP) leads to an improvement of mechanical, microstructural and physical properties. This paper gives an overview of a range of the properties that can be achieved by ECAP processing of pure copper including microstructural features, thermal stability, thermal conductivity and corrosion resistance.

Dynamic recrystallization and recovery during high-pressure torsion: Experimental evidence by torque measurement using ring specimens

“…Several papers reported a hardness peak in pure Cu processed by HPT [20,21] and ECAP [22][23][24], whereas the hardness peak for Cu was not reported in several other papers using HPT [25][26][27][28] and ECAP [29][30][31][32]. The current authors showed that Cu exhibits a hardness behavior similar to Al after HPT at a homologous temperature corresponding to room temperature of Al and successively keeping the samples at the same homologous temperature after HPT [33].…”

Corrosion of Ultrafine Grained Materials by Severe Plastic Deformation, an Overview

“…A) As the most simple structure, a various kind of pure metals of high and commercial purity such as aluminum, [87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94] copper, 6,37,[95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106] iron, 76,107) titanium, [108][109][110][111][112][113][114] magnesium, 34,72,[115][116][117] have been processed by SPD for corrosion studies. In this simple system, grain size or grain boundary density impacts the corrosion resistance as a primary metallurgical variable with very few other metallurgical changes involved.…”

“…Corrosion behavior has been investigated on UFG materials fabricated mainly by processing of SPD such as ECAP, ARB, HPT for aluminum and its alloy, [87][88][89][90][91][92][93]120,121,143,[150][151][152][153]156,[158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167][168][169][170][171] magnesium and its alloy, 34,72,[115][116][117]122,123,154,157,[172][173][174][175][176][177][178][179] copper and its alloy, 6,[96][97][98]…”

“…Effect of UFG formation on corrosion have mostly been investigated on copper of commercial purity, and is overall very small in all electrolytes tested. 6,[95][96][97][98]101,102,104,105,180) Pure copper is the best suitable metal for studies using dislocation etchant, [199][200][201] which attack only crystal defects such as edge dislocations and grain boundaries and leaves other parts intact. Hinted by this, UFG pure copper by ECAP was immersed in modi ed Livingston etchant in an effort to extract the effect of grain size on dissolution in the active state.…”

Effects of Strain Energy and Grain Size on Corrosion Resistance of Ultrafine Grained Fe-20%Cr Steels with Extremely low C and N Fabricated by ECAP

“…They observed a rather smooth surface with a smaller penetration rate at grain boundaries and thus considerable improvement in intergranular corrosion. For SPD materials, corrosion behavior such as general [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], intergranular [21][22][23] and pitting corrosion [21,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] of UFG aluminum and aluminum alloy [17,21,22,24,25,[29][30][31][32], copper and copper alloy [11,15,19,28] as well as stainless steels [10,12,18,23,27] and magnesium [13,14,16,20] processed by SPD, and corrosive environment dependence [33][34]…”