The viscoplastic self-consistent (VPSC) polycrystal model, where each grain is regarded as an ellipsoidal inclusion interacting with a homogeneous effective medium represented by the polycrystal has long been successful in explaining the mechanical response and crystallographic texture development during plastic deformation. VPSC has especially been used to model low-symmetry materials such as Mg-alloys, uranium, etc, which could not be addressed by the conventional Taylor model. Although there are several reports on the modeling of steel that successfully reproduce its measured crystallographic texture at specific reductions, few studies have been carried out to reproduce the evolution of the intensity of texture fibers at various rolling reductions. In this study the texture evolution of body-centered-cubic ultra-low carbon steel during cold rolling was calculated using the VPSC model and compared with textures measured at 40%, 60%, 70%, 80% and 90% reduction. The deformation by cold rolling was accommodated by 110 〈 111 〉 and 211 〈 111 〉 slip systems interacting via a Voce hardening law. Addressing a wide range of rolling reductions poses a more severe test on the modeling. It is found that accounting for grain shape, grain interaction with the surroundings, and their evolution with strain, is critical for explaining the experimentally observed evolution of texture intensities. Specifically, the mechanisms of grain-neighbor co-rotation and the role played by the relative plastic stiffness of grain and surrounding medium were explored in this work. The predicted evolution of the main texture components, namely, α fiber (RD// 〈 011 〉 ) and γ fiber (ND// 〈 111 〉 ) was compared with experimental data measured by x-ray Schultz method, resulting in that the calculated texture evolution using the above models captures well the experimental results which show a gentle ODF intensity increase in the γ fiber and a strong ODF increase near 211 〈 011 〉 components in the α fiber during cold rolling.

For the reduction of transformer noise and efficient use of energy, we developed a domain-refined highly grain-oriented silicon steel with a linearly grooved surface by an electrolytic etching method. The steel showed very low iron loss even after a high-temperature annealing process, such as stress relief annealing, while magnetic flux density at 800 A/m, which is one of the very fundamental evaluation criteria for grain-oriented silicon steel, was lower than that without grooves. In light of our previous study, steels with a low flux density are disadvantageous for lowering transformer noise, but there have been no reports on the detailed noise property of this grooved grain-oriented silicon steel. In this paper, we investigated transformer noise as well as the transformer loss for the first time by fabricating three model transformers, each of which comprised one of the following grain-oriented electrical steels: grooved grain-oriented silicon steel having flux density of 1.90 T at 800 A/m, non-grooved grain-oriented silicon steel having flux density of 1.93 T at 800 A/m, and non-grooved grain-oriented silicon steel having flux density of 1.90 T at 800 A/m. As a result, transformer loss exhibited a tendency similar to the loss of a single sheet, and the grooved grain-oriented silicon steel showed the lowest loss. As for noise, even with the lower flux density, the grooved grain-oriented silicon steel showed a very low noise level equivalent to that of the non-grooved grain-oriented silicon steel with the high flux density, while the non-grooved grain-oriented silicon steel with the low flux density showed the largest noise level. From the results of magnetostriction measurements and dynamic domain observation by a newly developed method, it was found that the grooves had little influence on the generation of magnetic domains, which increased magnetostriction and transformer noise. Thus, we confirmed that low noise and low loss properties of the transformer were both realized by the application of the grooved silicon steel.

Increasing the silicon content in non-grain-oriented (NO) electrical steel sheets is known to decrease iron loss by changing electrical resistivity and magnetostriction behavior. However, few studies on the effect of high silicon contents in grain-oriented (GO) electrical steel have been reported. One of the major differences in the iron loss of GO and NO is that excess eddy current loss, which has a strong relationship with the magnetic domain structure, is more dominant in total iron loss in GO. In this paper, high silicon GO was prepared by the CVD siliconizing method, which has the advantage that the silicon content can be changed without changing the crystal grain size and crystallographic texture of the specimen. It was found that iron loss was reduced as the silicon content was increased, and 6.5 mass% silicon steel showed about half the hysteresis loss of conventional 3 mass% silicon steel, but the eddy current loss in 6.5 mass% silicon steel was equivalent to or slightly larger than that in 3 mass% silicon steel. Magnetic domain observation and calculations suggested that this difference was a result of coarsening of the magnetic domains in the high silicon steel.

Among various off-equilibrium microstructures of additively manufactured Ti-6Al-4V alloy, electron beam powder bed fusion, in which three dimensional metallic objects are fabricated by melting the ingredient powder materials layer by layer on a pre-heated bed, results in a specimen that is nearly free of the preferred orientation of the $\alpha$-Ti phase as well as a low beta phase fraction of ~1 wt%. However, when further heat treatment of up to 1050 °C was applied to the material in our previous study, a strong texture aligning the hexagonal basal plane of $\alpha$ phase with the build direction and about 6% $\beta$ phase appeared at room temperature. In this study, to understand the mechanism of this heat treatment, the grain level microstructure of the additively manufactured Ti-6Al-4V was investigated using in situ high temperature EBSD up to 1000 °C, which allows the tracking of individual grains during a heat cycle. As a result, we found a random texture originating from the fine grains in the initial material and observed a significant suppression of $\alpha$ phase nucleation in the slow cooling after heating to 950 °C within the $\alpha$ and $\beta$ dual phase regime but close to the the $\beta$-transus temperature at ~980 °C, which led to a coarse microstructure. Furthermore, the texture resulting from phase transformation of the additively manufactured Ti-6Al-4V assuming nucleation at the grain boundaries was modeled, using the double Burgers orientation relationship for the first time. The model successfully reproduced the measured texture, suggesting that the texture enhancement of the $\alpha$ phase by the additional heat treatment derives also from the variant selection during the phase transformation and nucleation on grain boundaries.