Accessing Colony Boundary Strengthening of Fully Lamellar TiAl Alloys via Micromechanical Modeling

In this article, we present a strategy to decouple the relative influences of colony, domain and lamella boundary strengthening in fully lamellar titanium aluminide alloys, using a physics-based crystal plasticity modeling strategy. While lamella and domain boundary strengthening can be isolated in experiments using polysynthetically twinned crystals or mircomechanical testing, colony boundary strengthening can only be investigated in specimens in which all three strengthening mechanisms act simultaneously. Thus, isolating the colony boundary strengthening Hall–Petch coefficient [Formula: see text] experimentally requires a sufficient number of specimens with different colony sizes [Formula: see text] but constant lamella thickness [Formula: see text] and domain size [Formula: see text] , difficult to produce even with sophisticated alloying techniques. The here presented crystal plasticity model enables identification of the colony boundary strengthening coefficient [Formula: see text] as a function of lamella thickness [Formula: see text]. The constitutive description is based on the model of a polysynthetically twinned crystal which is adopted to a representative volume element of a fully lamellar microstructure. In order to capture the micro yield and subsequent micro hardening in weakly oriented colonies prior to macroscopic yield, the hardening relations of the adopted model are revised and calibrated against experiments with polysynthetically twinned crystals for plastic strains up to 15%.