Recovery of deformation microstructure in the bulk interior revealed by synchrotron X-ray micro-diffraction

A synchrotron X-ray micro-diffraction based technique, namely differential aperture X-ray microscopy (DAXM), is used to investigate the subgrain evolution in the bulk interior during ex-situ recovery annealing of a lightly deformed Al sample. This is the first 4D DAXM study of recovery. Supplementary TEM observations reveal that DAXM enables proper reconstruction of the microstructure, with the important addition that it is in 3D. The DAXM result provides a direct observation of the 3D microstructural evolution during annealing and confirms that subgrain boundary migration is an important mechanism for subgrain growth, preferentially removing small subgrains. Moreover, it gives new evidence of subgrain coalescence as an alternative mechanism for subgrain growth—some neighboring subgrains are observed to merge due to the decrease of the misorientation angle across certain subgrain boundaries. A possible interaction of the two recovery mechanisms is discussed, as well as the advantage and limitation of the DAXM technique for recovery studies.