s The aim of this investigation is the effect of the strain path on microstructure and mechanical properties of 60/40 alpha brass strip by accumulative roll bonding (ARB) process. The brass strips were produced (up to 5 cycles) by direct ARB process (route A) and with rotation angle 90° anti-clockwise ( route B C ), ± 90° (route B A ) and 180° (route C) around normal direction during ARB process. To conduct this study, the strips with a thickness of 1 mm and dimension of 6×10 cm 2 were used for route A and C, and dimension of 6×6 cm 2 was used for route B A and B C . The quality of roll-bonding produced in different strain path ARB was evaluated using optical microscopy. The results indicated that in A and C routes the bonding strength was improved with increasing the number of cycles but B A and B C routes indicated weaker bonding strength. It was also found that the interface bonding in the routes B A , B C and C seemed to have lower quality than that of route A. Tensile and hardness tests were performed on the produced sheets for evaluating their mechanical properties. The tensile strength and hardness values of the ARB processed 60/40 alpha brass strips with different routes increased about 300% higher than that of the annealed brass used as the original raw material. To better understand the mechanical behavior on different strain path, shear strain was simulated and compared. The results illustrated that shear strain decreased with changed rolling direction. In addition, the crystallite size, microstrain and dislocation density was estimated by using Rietveld method for all routes and various ARB cycles. The results showed crystallite size was between 22-32 nm in any routes. In order to clarify the failure mode, fracture surfaces after tensile test were studied by scanning electron microscopy. Fracture surfaces observations showed that failure mode in the ARB processed 60/40 alpha brass with different routes was "shear ductile rupture" with small elongated dimple.
