Microstructural evolution of Ti-6Al-7Nb alloy during high pressure torsion

Abstract

Ti-6Al-7Nb alloys are being evaluated for biomedical applications, in substitution of the more conventional Ti-6Al-7V. Both types of alloys present a microstructure containing the α and the β phases, which result in good compromise for mechanical applications. In the present work Ti-6Al-7Nb alloys were processed by High Pressure Torsion (HPT), varying the number of revolutions and thus the total imposed strain. X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) results revealed the formation of different crystallographic textures in samples subjected to HPT. Microhardness distribution, across the diameters of the disks, is rather homogeneous for all samples, with higher values for those subjected to 03 and 05 turns. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) micrographs have showed that an ultra-fine grained microstructure was obtained in all the samples.