Texture evolution and mechanical behavior of commercially pure Ti processed via pulsed electric current treatment

Spark plasma sintering is commonly utilized as a powder consolidation approach to fabricate high-performance ultrafine-grained bulk materials. In this study, a pulsed electric current, generated via spark plasma sintering, was applied to hot-rolled CP-Ti TA1 in order to study the influence on the α↔β allotropic transformation. Results show that an increased grain size of the α-Ti phase, together with a weakened texture, is accompanied by the increased plastic strain in the as-treated TA1 with increasing pulsed electric current intensity. The microstructure and texture changes are attributed to an enhancement in long-range atomic diffusion induced by the pulsed electric current intensity. Concomitantly, the increased plastic strain results from an increase in the number of active slip systems along the direction of the tensile test induced by the weakened texture of the {0001} pole figures and the trend of turning to the direction of the tensile test for the orientation index $$ \left\langle {10\overline{1} 0} \right\rangle $$ in pole figures. The results obtained herein provide an alternative pathway for the fabrication of high-performance metallic materials.