Effect of low-temperature rolling on the propensity to adiabatic shear banding of commercial purity tungsten

In this work, we have investigated the effect of low-temperature rolling on the mechanical properties of commercial purity tungsten, particularly the high strain rate (dynamic) behavior of the cold-rolled samples vis-a-vis the as-received coarse-grained material. After rolling, the material was tested under both quasi-static and dynamic (Kolsky bar) uniaxial compression loading conditions. We have found that low-temperature rolling both improves the ductility and the strength of commercial purity tungsten. The rolled tungsten exhibits elastic-nearly perfectly plastic behavior under quasi-static loading, and a strong flow softening tendency with a precipitous stress drop under dynamic loading. Both in situ high speed movie snapshots and post-mortem examination of the dynamic samples suggest that the precipitous stress drop was caused by adiabatic shear banding in the cold-rolled material. The greatly enhanced susceptibility to adiabatic shear banding in the cold-rolled tungsten can either be explained semi-quantitatively based on a mechanistic model or from the rolling texture that leads to geometric softening under dynamic loading. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.