Spatiotemporal Thermal Inhomogeneities During Compression of Highly Textured Zirconium

Using a focal plane array infrared camera, the heat generated during large strain compression (at a rate of 1 s⁻¹) is used to study the characteristics of plastic flow for hcp zirconium. Heat generation during plastic flow in a reference material, copper, was seen to develop uniformly both at the lower (40 μm/pixel) and higher (8 μm/pixel) magnifications used in this study. The thermomechanical response of Zr, however, was seen to depend on the loading direction with respect to the specimen texture. Highly textured zirconium compressed along nonbasal oriented grains results in a homogeneous thermal response at both scales. However, compression along basal (0001) oriented grains shows evidence of inhomogeneous deformation at small strains that lead to macroscale localization and failure at large strains. The conversion of plastic work into heat is observed to be a dynamic process, both in the time-dependent nature of the energy conversion, but also in the passage of waves and ‘bursts’ of plastic heating. Basal compression also showed evidence of small scale localization at strains far below macroscale localization, even below 10%. These localizations at the lower strain levels eventually dominate the response, and form the shear band that is responsible for the softening of the macroscopic stress–strain curve.