Revealing 3D intragranular micromechanical fields at triple junctions

Triple junctions, intersections of three or more grains in polycrystalline solids, are known locations of potential stress concentration and strain localization. In this work, intragranular lattice curvatures and elastic strains are measured at triple junctions via a novel zoom-in style combination of synchrotron X-ray techniques. Additionally, this work revisits the impact of including elastic strain gradients while calculating the dislocation density within embedded grains via the Nye dislocation tensor. Without elastic strain gradients, the dislocation density is underestimated at a hotspot by 27% of the maximum dislocation density value. Spatial regions near triple junctions are found to contain both the highest values of the intragranular misorientations metrics and generally higher values than grain boundaries (between two grains). A heterogenous distribution of intragranular misorientation, elastic strain, and dislocation density is measured within a grain along a single triple junction line, and the triple junction line end points (quad points) exhibit substantially different micromechanical fields. This work provides a unique 3D view of triple junctions within individual grains and highlights their spatially heterogenous intragranular micromechanical response along triple junction lines, especially when compared to relatively less complex behavior along grain boundaries. While a grain averaged example is provided of intergranular strain across grains, several examples of intragranular strain were visualized near a triple junction. The combined analysis of intragranular lattice curvature (associated with strain metrics) and elastic strain (associated with stress) provides a more complete characterization of the 3D sub-grain fields than previously reported.