Cast and wrought coppers can be strengthened by cold working. This article provides information on minor alloying elements, such as beryllium, silicon, nickel, tin, zinc, and chromium, used to strengthen copper. It details annealing and recrystallization and grain growth characteristics of copper. The article also discusses the tensile-stress-relaxation behavior of selected types of copper wires.

Brasses are copper alloys with zinc as the principal alloying element. This article provides information on the chemical compositions and mechanical properties of the three types of brasses: alpha, duplex and beta. It briefly discusses the Unified Numbering System designations, compositions, and classifications of wrought brasses and cast brasses. The article provides a discussion on annealing, recrystallization, and grain growth of wrought brasses. Stress relief of wrought brasses, which is typically conducted below the annealing temperatures, is also briefly described.

This article describes the changes in structure and properties that occur when cold worked metals and alloys are annealed. Recovery, recrystallization, and grain growth are the three stages of structural change that occur when cold-worked metal is annealed. The driving force and extent of structural or property changes may depend on alloy structure and the degree of prior work.

This article introduces the mechanism of diffusion and the common types of heat treatments such as annealing and precipitation hardening, which are applicable to most ferrous and nonferrous systems. Three distinct processes occur during annealing: recovery, recrystallization, and grain growth. The article also describes the various types of solid-state transformations such as isothermal transformation and athermal transformation, resulting from the heat treatment of nonferrous alloys. It provides information on the homogenization of chemical composition within a cast structure.

This article provides an in-depth treatment on the deformation and recrystallization of titanium alloys. It provides information on the predominant mode of plastic deformation that occurs in titanium in terms of the most common crystallographic planes. The article explains the relationship of the recovery process to the recrystallization, grain-growth process, and the effects of time and temperature on stress relief. It describes the factors that influence the rate of recrystallization and the conditions required for neocrystallization to occur. The article explains the mechanism of strain hardening and its effects on the mechanical properties of titanium alloys. It also discusses the factors that influence the superplasticity of titanium alloys.

The misorientation of a boundary of a growing grain is defined not only by its crystallography but also by the crystallography of the grain into which it is growing. This article focuses on the Monte Carlo Potts model that is typically used to model grain growth, Zener-Smith pinning, abnormal grain growth, and recrystallization. It introduces the basics of the model, providing details of the dynamics, simulation variables, boundary energy, boundary mobility, pinning systems, and stored energy. The article explains how to incorporate experimental parameters and how to validate the model by comparing the observed behavior quantitatively with theory. The industrial applications of the model are also discussed. The article also provides a wide selection of the algorithms for implementing the Potts model, such as boundary-site models, n -fold way models, and parallel models, which are needed to simulate large-scale industrial applications.

This article reviews network models and their applications for the simulation of various physical phenomena related to grain-boundary migration. It discusses the steps involved in the implementation of two and three-dimensional network models, namely, acquisition and discretization of the microstructure, formulation of the equation of motion, and implementation of the topological transformations. The article presents examples that illustrate the simulation of physical phenomena to demonstrate the predictive power and flexibility of network models.

The modeling and simulation of texture evolution for titanium alloys is often tightly coupled to microstructure evolution. This article focuses on a number of problems for titanium alloys in which such coupling is critical in the development of quantitative models. It discusses the phase equilibria, crystallography, and deformation behavior of titanium and titanium alloys. The article describes the modeling and simulation of recrystallization and grain growth of single-phase beta and single-phase alpha titanium. The deformation- and transformation-texture evolution of two-phase (alpha/beta) titanium alloys are also discussed.

Recrystallization is to a large extent responsible for their final mechanical properties. This article commences with a discussion on static recrystallization (SRX) and dynamic recrystallization (DRX). The DRX includes continuous dynamic recrystallization (CDRX) and discontinuous dynamic recrystallization (DDRX). The article discusses the assumptions and simplifications for the Avrami analysis. It describes the effects of nucleation and growth rates on recrystallization kinetics and recrystallized grain size based on the Johnson-Mehl-Avrami-Kolmogorov model for static recrystallization. The article reviews the kinetics of DRX with the aid of the Avrami relations. It considers the basic framework of the mesoscale approach for DDRX, including the three basic equations for grain size changes, strain hardening and dynamic recovery, and nucleation. The article explains the mesoscale approach for CDRX to predict microstructural evolutions occurring during hot deformation, along with an illustration of the main features of the CDRX mesoscale model.

This article assesses the evolution of martensite modeling in the changing materials engineering environment. It describes the physics of displacive transformations using Ginzburg-Landau theory, microstructure representation, dynamics and simulations, density functional theory, and shuffle transitions. The article reviews the application of the Ginzburg-Landau approach to rigorous solutions for issues in the structure of a martensitic nucleus based on the martensitic nucleation theory. The three basic behavior modes of martensitic growth, such as elastic, elastic/plastic, and fully plastic are discussed. The article also reviews the overall kinetics of martensitic transformations.

Modeling of structure formation in casting of alloys involves several length scales, ranging from the atomic level to macroscopic scale. Intermediate length scales are used to define the microstructure of the growing phases and the grain structure. This article discusses the principles and applications of phase field method and cellular automaton method for modeling the direct evolution of structure at the intermediate length scales, where transport phenomena govern the spatial and temporal evolution of the structure that involves nucleation and growth.

Recovery, recrystallization, and grain growth are microstructural changes that occur during annealing after cold plastic deformation and/or during hot working of metals. This article reviews the structure of the deformed state and describes the changes in the properties and microstructures of a cold-worked metal during recovery stage. It discusses the recrystallization that occurs by the nucleation and growth of grains. The article also reviews the growth behavior of the grains, explaining that the grain growth can be classified into two types: normal or continuous grain growth and abnormal or discontinuous grain growth. It also examines the key mechanisms that control microstructure evolution during hot working and subsequent heat treatment. These include dynamic recovery, dynamic recrystallization, metadynamic recrystallization, static recovery, static recrystallization, and grain growth.

This article reviews the general aspects of microstructure evolution during thermomechanical processing. The effect of thermomechanical processing on microstructure evolution is summarized to provide insight into the aspect of process design. The article provides information on hot working and key processes that control microstructure evolution: dynamic recovery, static recovery, recrystallization, and grain growth. Some of the key phenomenological descriptions of plastic flow and microstructure evolution are also summarized. The article concludes with a discussion on the modeling of microstructure evolution.

Sintering provides the interparticle bonding that generates the attractive forces needed to hold together the otherwise loose ceramic powder mass. It also improves hardness, strength, transparency, toughness, electrical conductivity, thermal expansion, magnetic saturation, corrosion resistance, and other properties. This article discusses the fundamentals of sintering and its effects on pore structures and particle density. It addresses some of the more common sintering methods, including solid-state, liquid-phase, and gas pressure sintering, and presents alternative processes such as reaction sintering and self-propagating, high-temperature synthesis. It also describes several pressure densification methods, including hot isostatic pressing, gas pressure sintering, molten particle deposition, and sol-gel processing. The article concludes with a section on grain growth that discusses the underlying mechanisms and kinetics and the relationship between grain growth and densification.

This article describes eight stages of the atomistic film growth: vaporization of the material, transport of the material to the substrate, condensation and nucleation of the atoms, nuclei growth, interface formation, film growth, changes in structure during the deposition, and postdeposition changes. It also discusses the effects and causes of growth-related properties of films deposited by physical vapor deposition processes, including residual film stress, density, and adhesion.

The constitutive relations for metalworking include elements of behavior at ambient temperature as well as high-temperature response. This article presents equations for strain hardening and strain-rate-sensitive flow, with alternate sections on empirically determined properties, followed by the models of constitutive behavior. It provides a discussion on creep mechanisms involving dislocation and diffusional flow, such as the Nabarro-Herring creep and the Coble creep. The equations for the several creep rates are also presented. Research on the mechanism of the superplastic flow in fine-grain metals has encompassed many ideas, such as the diffusional creep, dislocation creep with diffusional accommodation at grain boundaries, and concepts of grain-mantle deformation. The article concludes with information on the kinetics of superplastic deformation processes, including low stress behavior, concurrent grain growth, and high stress behavior.

This article discusses selected highlights of thermodynamic relationships during solidification and nucleation kinetics behavior in connection with the basis of nucleation treatments, such as grain refinement and inoculation, to provide a summary of nucleation phenomena during casting. Nucleation during solidification is a thermally activated process involving a fluctuational growth in the sizes of clusters of solids. The article describes nucleation phenomenon such as homogeneous nucleation and heterogeneous nucleation. It discusses various grain refinement models, such as carbide-boride model, free growth model, and constitutional undercooling model. The article concludes with a section on thermal analysis techniques for assessing grain-refining characteristics during master alloy processing.

Any model that describes the early stage of cavitation must therefore address experimental observations of continuous nucleation, cracklike interface cavities, cavity growth from nanometer-scale sizes, and debonding at particle interfaces and formation of large-faceted cavities. This article summarizes the microstructural details of the early stages of cavitation in metals for understanding the interface-constrained plasticity cavitation model. It discusses formulation, predictions and implications, involved in analysis of cavitation under constrained conditions.

This article describes the heat treatment of wrought solid-solution and precipitation-hardening alloys with a focus on the major families of wrought nickel alloys. It also provides information on the heat treatment of some representative solid-solution alloys in the Monel (Ni-Cu), Inconel (Ni-Cr-Mo), Hastelloy (Ni-Mo-Cr), and Incoloy (Ni-Fe-Cr) families of alloys. The heat treatment processes for gamma prime nickel alloys, gamma prime nickel-iron superalloys, and gamma double-prime nickel-iron superalloys are also included. The article also provides information on age-hardenable alloys, and the effects of cold work on aging response and grain growth with examples.

Grain refinement in aluminum casting alloys tends to reduce the amount of porosity and the size of the pores and to improve mechanical properties, especially fatigue strength. This article provides information on measurement of grain size in alloys and describes the mechanisms of grain refinement in aluminum casting alloys. It reviews the use of boron and titanium as a grain refiner for aluminum casting alloys. The article discusses the best practices for grain refinement in various aluminum casting alloys. These include aluminum-silicon casting alloys, aluminum-silicon-copper casting alloys, aluminum-silicon-copper casting alloys, aluminum-zinc-magnesium casting alloys, and aluminum-magnesium casting alloys. The article also discusses benefits of grain refinement in aluminum casting alloys.