Effect of Strain Path Change during Cold Rolling On the Evolution of Deformation and Recrystallization Textures of High Purity Nickel

The effect of strain path change during cold rolling and subsequent annealing on the evolution of microstructure, texture and hardness properties of high purity nickel (~99.7%, average size ~ 36 μm) has been studied in the present work. Strain path change is achieved by employing two different rolling routes, namely, straight cold rolling (SCR) and cross cold rolling (CCR) in the present investigation. The rolling direction is kept constant throughout the deformation process in SCR route but during CCR processing the rolling direction (RD) and the transverse direction (TD) are mutually interchanged in every consecutive pass by rotating the sample around the normal direction (ND). Nickel sheets were deformed up to 90% reduction in thickness using the above two processing routes