Revealing Grain Boundary Sliding from Textures of a Deformed Nanocrystalline Pd–Au Alloy

Employing a recent modeling scheme for grain boundary sliding [Zhao et al. Adv. Eng. Mater. 2017, doi:10.1002/adem.201700212], crystallographic textures were simulated for nanocrystalline fcc metals deformed in shear compression. It is shown that, as grain boundary sliding increases, the texture strength decreases while the signature of the texture type remains the same. Grain boundary sliding affects the texture components differently with respect to intensity and angular position. A comparison of a simulation and an experiment on a Pd–10 atom % Au alloy with a 15 nm grain size reveals that, at room temperature, the predominant deformation mode is grain boundary sliding contributing to strain by about 60%.