Part VI – June 1968 – Communications - Twin Boundaries in Aluminum

ALTHOUGH annealing twins are frequently observed in many fcc metals, their occurrence in aluminum is relatively rare. ~ahn' in his review of twinning has listed only a few references to observations of twins in aluminum, e.g., Refs. 2 and 3. They have also been shown to occur in evaporated aluminum layers.4 During the present work, several annealing twins were studied in aluminum. The specimens of 1099-grade aluminum had the following thermomechanical treatment: deformed 90 pct by rolling, partially re-crystallized, further deformed 60 pct to a final thickness of 100 p, then annealed for 24 hr at 120°C. This treatment produced several annealing twins—-about ten per electron microscope specimen. The specimens were produced by the window technique and examined in a Phillips E.M. 200 operating at 100 kv. A typical twin boundary is shown in Fig. 1. For several of the twins studied the twin plane could be tilted so that it was parallel to the electron beam, e.g., Fig. 2. The associated diffraction pattern, Fig. 3, shows the twinned relationship between the grains. The twinning plane in each case was (111). Use of a reflection common to both the twin and the matrix,* i.e., using reflecting planes parallel in the twin and the matrix, the coherent twin boundary becomes invisible and only the noncoherent segments of the stepped boundary are seen, e.g., Fig. 4. Trace analysis of the boundaries showed that the long straight portions were invariably the twin plane; i.e., these portions are coherent. The planes of the shorter segments are shown by Fig. 5 to be (551 1, (7111, and {211).