text: During plastic deformation the work performed is the integral of the stress and strain in the plastic deformation regime. Although the majority of this work is converted to heat, some fraction (~1–5%) is retained in the material as defects—particularly dislocations. The rearrangement or elimination of these dislocations will reduce the internal energy of the system and so there is a thermodynamic driving force for such processes. At moderate to high temperatures, particularly in materials with a high stacking fault energy such as aluminium and nickel, recovery occurs readily and free dislocations will readily rearrange themselves into subgrains surrounded by low-angle grain boundaries.
  The driving force is the difference in energy between the deformed and recrystallized state ΔE which can be determined by the dislocation density or the subgrain size and boundary energy (Doherty, 2005):
  where ρ is the dislocation density, G is the shear modulus, b is the Burgers vector of the dislocations, γ is the subgrain boundary energy and d is the subgrain size.