Abstract
The presence of hydrostatic pressure is a general crucial characteristic of severe plastic deformation methods for reaching high strains and for introducing large quantities of lattice defects, which are necessary to establish new grain boundaries. Insights into the processes occurring during deformation and the influence of hydrostatic pressure are necessary to help better understand the SPD methods. A special experimental procedure was designed to simulate the hydrostatic pressure release: High pressure torsion (HPT)-deformed microstructure changes related to the release of hydrostatic pressure after the HPT deformation of copper and nickel were studied by freezing the sample before releasing the pressure. High-resolution in-situ X-ray diffraction of the heating process was performed using synchrotron radiation in order to apply X-ray line profile analysis to analyze the pressure release. The results on copper and nickel generally indicated the influence of hydrostatic pressure on the mobility and interaction of deformation-induced defects as well as the resulting microstructure.