Deformation behavior of high strength steel with a tensile strength of 590 MPa under biaxial tension was investigated for a work equivalent plastic strain range of 0.002 0.16. The test material was bent and laser welded to fabricate a tubular specimen with an inner diameter of 44.6mm and wall thickness of 1.2 mm. Using a servo-controlled tension-internal pressure testing machine, many linear stress paths in the first quadrant of stress space were applied to the tubular specimens. Moreover, biaxial tensile tests using a cruciform specimen were performed to precisely measure the deformation behavior of the test material for a small strain range following initial yielding. True stress-true plastic strain curves, contours of plastic work in stress space and the directions of plastic strain rates were measured and compared with those calculated using selected yield functions. The plastic deformation behavior up to an equivalent plastic strain of 0.16 was successfully measured. The Yld2000-2d yield function most closely predicts the general work contour trends and the directions of plastic strain rates of the test material.

In order to improve the instrumental accessibility of neutron diffraction techniques, many emerging compact neutron sources and in-house neutron diffractometers are being developed, even though the precision level of neutron diffraction experiments performed on such instruments was thought to be incomparable with that of large-scale neutron facilities. As a challenging project, the RIKEN accelerator-driven compact neutron source (RANS) was employed here to establish the technical environment for texture measurements, and the recalculated pole figures and orientation distribution functions of an interstitial-free steel sheet obtained from RANS were compared with the results from another two neutron diffractometers well established for texture measurement. These quantitative comparisons revealed that the precise neutron diffraction texture measurement at RANS has been realized successfully, and the fine region division of the neutron detector panel is invaluable for improving the stereographic resolution of texture measurements. Moreover, through selectively using the parts of the obtained neutron diffraction patterns that exhibit good statistics, the Rietveld texture analysis improves the reliability of the texture measurement to a certain extent. These technical research results may accelerate the development of other easily accessible techniques for evaluation of engineering materials using compact neutron sources, and also help to improve the data-collection efficiency for various time-resolved scattering experiments at large-scale neutron facilities.