Fatigue Crack Resistance of Ultrafine-Grained Copper Structures

Abstract

In the last 25 years, we have witnessed to an increasing interest in developing and characterising the so-called microand nano-scale classes of structural materials. Microand nano-materials, which have arrangements, grain structures and sub-structures of less than one micron, present mechanical properties better than those belonging to the original materials (Valiev, 1997; Valiev et al., 2000). In general, since the grain size ranges between 0.1 and 1 m, such materials are designated as ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials.