Abstract
It is now well established that the kinetics of impurity segregation is greatly increased by the defect annihilation process occurring during the return to equilibrium of a material initially in a metastable state (quenched, irradiated, cold worked). During the return to equilibrium of a cold worked material, i.e. during a recrystallisation anneal, both the recovery and recrystallisation stages contribute to the acceleration of the segregation kinetics. In this work, an attempt is made to study the contribution of each stage separately, with particular emphasis on the recovery mechanisms of cold worked pure nickel and the way these mechanisms affect sulphur segregation taking place in this material. For this purpose, recrystallisation and segregation anneals at 455°C were carried out on lightly (0.25 true strain) and heavily (0.8 true strain) cold rolled nickel. It was found that sulphur segregation in the lightly deformed material took place entirely during the incubation time preceding recrystallisation, i.e. during the recovery stage. The process is thought to involve dislocation pipe diffusion for which a diffusion coefficient of 6.4×10-9 m2 s-1 was estimated. In the heavily deformed material, segregation was concomitant with recrystallisation and the mechanism thought to be most probable is that involving impurity drag.
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