Due to their superb mechanical properties and high specific mass, tungsten heavy alloys are used in demanding applications, such as kinetic penetrators, gyroscope rotors, or radiation shielding. However, their structure, consisting of hard tungsten particles embedded in a soft matrix, makes the deformation processing a challenging task. This study focused on the characterization of deformation behavior during thermomechanical processing of a WNiCo tungsten heavy alloy (THA) via the method of rotary swaging at various temperatures. Emphasis is given to microstrain development and determination of the activated slip systems and dislocation density via neutron diffraction. The analyses showed that the grains of the NiCo2W matrix refined significantly after the deformation treatments. The microstrain was higher in the cold swaged sample (44.2 × 10-4). Both the samples swaged at 20 °C and 900 °C exhibited the activation of edge dislocations with <111> {110} or <110> {111} slip systems, and/or screw dislocations with <110> slip system in the NiCo2W matrix. Dislocation densities were determined and the results were correlated with the final mechanical properties of the swaged bars.
Keywords: dislocations; microstrain; neutron diffraction; rotary swaging; tungsten.