Nanostructuring of an additively manufactured CoCrFeNi multi-principal element alloy using severe plastic deformation: Comparison of two materials processed by different laser scan speeds

Experiments were conducted to reveal the refinement of the microstructure and the evolution of the hardness of an additively manufactured (AM) CoCrFeNi multi-principal element alloy (MPEA) processed by severe plastic deformation (SPD) using high pressure torsion (HPT) technique. AM was carried out by laser powder bed fusion (L-PBF) technique at two different laser scan speeds. The as-built alloys for both laser scan speeds have a single-phase face-centered cubic (fcc) structure with <110> fiber texture parallel to the building direction. X-ray line profile analysis (XLPA) revealed that the dislocation density was considerably high even in the AM-processed state before HPT (3 × 10¹⁴ m⁻²) which increased by two orders of magnitude during HPT. The saturation of the lattice defects (dislocation density and twin fault probability) as well as the crystallite size occurred at a shear strain of about 10 during HPT. In both AM-processed alloys, <111> fiber texture developed parallel to the normal of the HPT-processed disks. For both laser scan speeds, the initial grain size in the AM-processed samples was refined from 70 to 90 μm to the nanocrystalline regime after 10 turns of HPT. Additionally, nanotwins formed with a probability of about 3 %. The initial hardness of the AM-processed MPEA samples for both laser scan speeds was 2700–2800 MPa, which is superior to that of CoCrFeNi produced by casting (about 1380 MPa). This can be explained by the high dislocation density in the AM-processed specimens. The formation of nanostructure with high lattice defect density during HPT resulted in a very high hardness value of about 5500 MPa in the AM-processed CoCrFeNi MPEA samples for both laser scan speeds.