Grain Structure Development During Friction Stir Welding of Single-Crystal Austenitic Stainless Steel

The high-resolution electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique was used to study the grain boundary development and texture evolution during friction stir welding (FSW) in a single-crystal austenitic stainless steel. Strain-induced crystal rotations were found to be induced by simple shear deformation. With the crystal rotations, the single-crystal structure was broken up into a fine-grained polycrystalline aggregate in the stir zone. This process was deduced to be governed by continuous and discontinuous recrystallizations operating during the FSW process. The final texture which evolved in the stir zone was dominated by ideal simple shear orientations.