Physics and phenomenology of strain hardening: the FCC case

The plan of the article is as follows. Section 2 will introduce experimental and theoretical fundamentals; Section 3 will present a detailed analysis and abstraction of the experimental facts concerning strain hardening; followed by a detailed review of (our) 'basic model'. comprising the mechanisms of athermal hardening (Section 4) and dynamic recovery (Section 5). All this is concerned with pure face-centered cubic (fcc) metals, since most is known about these. But different fcc metals behave differently-in a sequence dictated by the stacking-fault energy (SFE); this material dependence will be treated in detail. It will be augmented by a discussion, to show that the developed concept provides the framework also for other material classes such as solution hardened alloys as well as hexagonal and bcc metals. Section 6 will give a summary, with an emphasis on fundamental aspects of future plasticity research. The model was developed for, and most of the experiments were done on, pure face-centered-cubic (FCC) metals with an emphasis on polycrystals [Cu, Ag, Ni, Al].