It was recalled that disordered arrays of extrinsic grain boundary dislocations had been suggested to be part of a non-equilibrium grain boundary structure which formed during the preparation of ultra fine-grained materials via severe plastic deformation. The relaxation kinetics of such arrays were studied here by means of computer simulations in order to determine whether they were stable at room temperature. The relaxation law, exp[-t½], which was predicted by the simulations was similar to that observed for the recovery kinetics of volume expansion in ultra fine-grained Ni.

A.A.Nazarov: Annales de Chimie, 1996, 21[6-7], 461-9