2. Fundamental aspects

2.1 General

To develop these fundamental aspects, we will use the logic diagram in figure 2 , which shows how a material with a small grain size can exhibit high elongations at break, provided that no structural evolution leads either to premature breakage (cavitation) or to a change in the deformation mechanism (grain coarsening). We will consider the various stages of this scheme in turn, and compare them with recently published experimental results.