Zinc is utilized in steel industries, such as Tata Steel, to protect their products from corrosion. One major problem of these coatings is their inherently brittle behaviour, causing undesired fracture, which enhances corrosion. In this Study we will unravel some fundamental physical aspects of Zinc, which are driving the plasticity.

To study the fundamental plasticity of Zinc, single and bi-crystal specimens are extracted directly from the Zinc coating by means of using Focused Ion Beam (FIB) milling. The specimens are reshaped into hammer like tensile specimens with a gauge length of about 10 µm (see Figure) for the in-house developed Nano tensile machine, which showed fruitful results in the past [2]. To push the results even further we are going to utilize a brand new developed technique for the identification of Slip systems. This identification method requires the crystallographic orientation (obtained through Electron back Scatter diffraction (EBSD)) and the full displacement field (obtained by the means of Digital Image correlation (DIC) with an InSn pattern (size:100 nm)) in order to determine all active Slip systems at a given position of the specimen.

Within this study it could be demonstrated that the deformation mechanism of Zinc can be highly complex, due to a successive reaction of different mechanism and their interaction with each other, even for the simpler case of a single crystal. To study the influence of a grain boundary on the mechanics of zinc, two single grain specimens with different orientations have been tested, together with a bi-crystal, which was made of the same two grains, which were used for the single grain specimens. The direct comparison between the bi-crystal measurement and the single crystal specimen shows, that the active Slip System can be either suppressed or altered, dependent on the grain boundary. Furthermore it could also be demonstrated that grain boundary gliding occurs always in combination of the activation of Slip systems.

References
[1] Vermeij, T., Peerlings, R. H. J., Geers, M. G. D., & Hoefnagels, J. P. M. (2023). Automated identification of slip system activity fields from digital image correlation data. Acta Materialia, 243, 118502.
[2] Du, C., Maresca, F., Geers, M. G., & Hoefnagels, J. P. (2018). Ferrite slip system activation investigated by uniaxial micro-tensile tests and simulations. Acta Materialia, 146, 314-327.