COLD WORK-HARDENING IN STAGE-IV AND STAGE-V OF FCC METALS .1. EXPERIMENTS AND INTERPRETATION

The paper presents numerous measurements which confirm stages IV and V to be general ranges of cold work deformation. Analogous to stage II, stage IV exhibits a linear athermal hardening with constant strain rate sensitivity and activation enthalpy. In stage IV the dislocation cell size is constant, while the dislocation density growth rate is markedly reduced compared with stages II and III. Features of stage V are analogous to stage III, the increase of strain rate sensitivity (decrease of activation enthalpy) indicating the onset of thermally activated dislocation annihilation. In stage V, the mechanism is identified as dislocation climb from observing subgrain formation and saturation in density of deformation induced vacancies. Comparisons with recent investigations of stage IV and V at high temperatures suggest a common picture of low and high temperature deformation which only requires principles of storage and annihilation for both screw and edge dislocations.