Two, high purity, Al-0.1 and 0.3wt%Mn alloys have been cold deformed in plane strain compression to strains of order 1.8 and the kinetics of subsequent recovery by sub-grain coarsening during annealing at 150-300°C measured by high resolution FEG-SEM EBSD. Accurate sub-grain size and misorientation distributions and their evolution with time and temperature have been determined. The average growth rates are then used to estimate the sub-grain boundary mobilities. Growth is analyzed by two well-known growth laws for the average sub-grain size δ (t): i) the standard relation for grain growth: where the exponent n takes values of 2-8 and ii) the relation proposed by Nes for dislocation climb in sub-grain walls: It is shown that the latter relation gives a better fit with the data in terms of the time and temperature dependence of the sub-grain sizes. In particular the activation energies for the logarithmic law are much closer to the values expected for solute-controlled movement of sub-boundaries.
