Isothermal annealing of cold-rolled high-purity nickel

Electron backscattered patterns have been employed to reveal the details of the texture evolution in 90%, 95% and 97.5% cold-rolled, polycrystalline, high-purity nickel specimens after 1 h anneals at a variety of temperatures. The results show that increasing the thickness reduction of cold-rolling both strengthened the cube texture developed after primary recrystallization, and increased its thermal stability at elevated temperatures. In the 90% cold-rolled specimens, secondary recrystallization occurred during annealing at 600 °C but could not be completed at temperatures up to 1000 °C. In contrast, extensive secondary recrystallization occurred in 95% and 97.5% cold-rolled specimens that were annealed at temperatures up to 1000 °C. Most of the orientations of the second recrystallized grains were related to the primarily recrystallized cube texture by a 41° rotation around about 〈1 1 1〉 axis or a 27° rotation about 〈2 1 1〉, while a few secondary-recrystallized grains were found to have an 18°/〈1 0 0〉 misorientation relationship with the cube-oriented matrix. It appears that the preferred rotation angles/axes is dependent on the rolling reduction.