Approaching the refinement limit of nano laminated structures in cubic metals by severe plastic deformation.

Grain size refinement stagnates at the balance between refinement by dislocation accumulation and coarsening by thermal recovery for generally equiaxed structures upon increase of plastic strain. It is curious if this stagnation occurs also for laminated structures. In this paper, three kinds of metal with nanolamellar (NL) structure were successfully prepared by the method of equal channel angular processing (ECAP) followed by liquid nitrogen rolling (LNR).