Kinetics of Grain Boundary Recovery in Deformed Polycrystals

Annealing kinetics are studied for nonequilibrium ensembles of dislocations occurring in grain boundaries during plastic deformation. Two types of dislocation ensembles are considered: 1) walls of sessile extrinsic grain boundary dislocations (EGBDs), which cause a change of the GB misorientation angle, and 2) arrays of glissile EGBDs having a Burgers vector tangential to the grain boundary plane. For both types similar exponential relationships are obtained for the relaxation of the average EGBD density, with approximately the same characteristic time proportional to the cube of grain size.