On the nucleation of deformation twins at the early stages of plasticity

Understanding the deformation mechanisms of hexagonal close-packed (HCP) polycrystals at the grain scale is crucial for developing both macro and micro scale predictive models. Slip and twinning are the two main deformation mechanisms of HCP polycrystals at room temperature. In this paper, the development of grain-level stress tensors during nucleation and growth of twins is investigated. A pure zirconium specimen with HCP crystals is deformed in-situ while the centre-of-mass, orientation, elastic strain, and stress of individual grains are measured by three-dimensional synchrotron X-ray diffraction (3D-XRD). The observed microstructure is subsequently imported into a crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) model to simulate the deformation of the polycrystal. The evolution of stress in twin-parent pairs at the early stages of plasticity, further into plasticity zone, and unload is studied. It is shown that twins do not relax very much at the nucleation step, but the difference between the measured stress in the twin and parent increases further into plastic zone where twins relax. While at the early stages of plasticity all six twin variants are active, a slightly better estimation of active variants is obtained using the measured grain-resolved stress tensors.