The many facets of deformation mechanism mapping and the application to nanostructured materials

Deformation mechanism maps are well established in the field of high temperature creep for materials having conventional coarse grain sizes but they are almost unknown within the field of nanostructured materials. This paper summarizes the background to deformation mechanism mapping, presents simplified examples that may be used to easily construct appropriate maps for any selected condition, demonstrates the potential extension of this approach to other areas such as creep fracture, and then considers the potential limitations associated with using the same approach to predict the deformation mechanisms in true nanostructured materials. Two representative deformation mechanism maps are shown for an ultrafine-grained alloy processed either by equal-channel angular pressing or by high-pressure torsion.