Interplay of dislocation-related relaxation processes in iron-based materials

The internal friction spectra in various cold-worked iron-based alloys show that the intensity ratio of the peaks, corresponding to the relaxation processes at 0.52 eV ,beta-peak, and 0.96 eV, gamma-peak, is proportional to the impurity concentration. Such correlated behavior of the two most dominant modes in the spectra is explained by a model which incorporates an increase in the beta-relaxation process at the expense of the kinkantikink pair gamma-peak nucleation process in pinned dislocation segments. Very good agreement between measured and calculated spectra is obtained by varying a single parameter: the ratio between the average size of the kink-antikink pairs and the average impurity-impurity distance.