The synergistic effect of grain boundary and grain orientation on micro-mechanical properties of austenitic stainless steel

Micro/nano-scale deformation behavior including hardness, elastic modulus, and pop-ins, was studied in a medical austenitic stainless steel followed by post-mortem EBSD characterization. Relatively higher hardness and modulus was observed near {101} and more pop-ins occurred in this orientation at high loading rate. The activation volume (v) obtained from nanoindentation had weak dependence on grain orientation and was ~10–20 b³, indicating that neither diffusional creep processes nor conventional dislocation segments passing through dislocation forests controls plastic deformation in our study. The plastic zone radius (c) and the distance of the indent from the grain boundary (d) were used to describe the effect of grain boundary on the pop-in effect. The ratio of c/d meets amplitude version of Gaussian peak function distribution for a given orientation, whose peak value remains nearly constant for all the orientations.