Institute of Metals Division - Dislocations in Deformed Single Crystals of Alpha Brass. Part I: General Observations

Using a combined decoration and etching technique the dislocation structure of annealed and deformed a brass has been studied. Annealed crystals revealed a low density forest and well-developed subboundaries; lightly deformed crystals contained discrete groups of dislocations. The dislocation density and the number of dislocations in a group were obtained from the micrographs. Using slip-line data, the mean path of a dislocation and the configuration of groups along an active slip plane have been deduced. Observations on secondary and cross-slip are reported. It has been the aim of many investigations to obtain detailed knowledge of the dislocation patterns which are present in metals before and after their deformation. The "decoration" of dislocations with impurity atoms has been considered as one of the promising experimental approaches, and much work has been done to develop this technique for revealing dislocation sites in metals. Following the early work by Castaing,' Castaing and Guinier,' and Lacombe and Berghezan~ on aluminum-rich aluminum-copper alloys, dislocations in this material have been studied extensively by others.+' In these alloys the dislocation sites act as nuclei for the precipitation of the second phase. The main results of the investigations on aluminum with copper are: i) the confirmation of the earlier contention that subboundaries consist of dislocation walls, ii) that many more dislocations are found in slip bands than in regions where less glide had taken place, iii) the observation of individual dislocations, lying nearly parallel to the surface investigated, and iv) that parts of dislocation loops, apparently emitted from a dislocation source, could be made visible. Recently, Jacquet, Weill, and Calvert have succeeded in revealing nearly concentric dislocation loops in quenched A1-4 pct Cu and thus indicated directly the existence of dislocation sources in a fcc metal specimen of normal dimensions. Another decoration method developed by Dash10'11 and applied to silicon crystals makes use of diffusing copper to the dislocations from a surface deposition. The dislocation pattern can then be observed by an infrared technique. His results include evidence for symmetrical and spiral Frank-Read sources, and for arrays of dislocation loops which follow simple crys-tallographic directions. Recently Low and Guard" have studied the dislocation structure of silicon-iron using carbon for the