Twin transmission and variant continuity in Mg bicrystals

This chapter explores the role of twin transmission and twin variant continuity in relation to grain boundary misorientation in magnesium. Twin transmission is an important plastic mechanism, an understanding of which would facilitate the wide-scale adoption of magnesium as a lightweight alternative to prevalent industry options. We thus employ our recently proposed parameter-free grain boundary model, which captures one-to-one twin pattern development across crystals using the crystal plasticity finite element method. We demonstrate that a principle of twin variant continuity is operative for specific misorientation angles relative to the c-axis but not the a-axis. It is an important principle that needs to be addressed in the literature, and this chapter only begins its exploration. It is a potential parameter that promotes twin transmission in the 20–40-degree range more than at smaller misorientations. We compare it to an electron back-scattered diffraction image to validate the interpretation of our simulations.