Effect of γ phase on mechanical behavior and detwinning evolution of directionally solidified Ni-Mn-Ga alloys under uniaxial compression

•The morphology of γ phase influences the mechanical behavior in Ni-Mn-Ga alloys.•The detwinning stress agrees with the Schmid factors during detwinning.•Deformation gradient tensor explains the detwinning strain for these specimens. Specimens with single-phase martensite, net-like γ/martensite mixed structure and lamella-like γ/martensite mixed structure were designed to investigate the effect of the γ phase on the mechanical behavior and the detwinning of non-modulated (NM) martensitic variant in Ni-rich Ni-Mn-Ga alloys under uniaxial compression. It can be found the existence of the γ phase significantly enhances the compressive stresses, and the net-like γ phase specimen presents a higher value of compressive strain than that of the lamella-like γ phase specimen. Especially, the detwinning plateau of the lamella-like γ phase specimen is almost invisible due to the martensite colonies with low Schmid factors. Finally, according to the calculation of deformation gradient tensor, we found that the tensors along compression direction (εzz) of net-like γ phase/martensite mixed structure specimen and single-phase martensite specimen are lower than that of the specimen with lamella-like γ phase/martensite mixed structure, which well explained the detwinning strain for these specimens. The present study not only highlights the role of γ phase on the mechanical behavior, but also provides more guidelines for the mechanical training of Ni-Mn-Ga shape memory alloys.