The rod production process comprise

The rod production process comprised a few stages. First, the
billets were subjected to ECAP. In this process, the billets were punched
in a special equipment through two intersecting channels of equal crosssectional
area lying at 90° to each other. The deformationwas conducted
at 450 °C. Therewere four passes and the billetswere rotated about the
longitudinal axis by 90° after each pass [28]. The obtained billets were
finally subjected to forging and drawing with cumulative deformation
equal to 80%. The last stage was to anneal them at 300–350 °C for 1 h.