Cu–Cr-based alloys are promising for thermoelectrical applications owing to their combined electrical, thermal, and mechanical performance. While their electrical properties have been widely explored, their mechanical properties have received much less attention. Herein, we investigate the tensile mechanical response of two Cu-35Cr (%wt) metal matrix composites. The first composite was fabricated by solid state sintering and the other one by vacuum arc remelting. These two processing routes result in significant differences in microstructures. The sintered composite shows equiaxed inclusions of Cr distributed in a Cu matrix with residual pores located within the Cu matrix and at the Cu/Cr interfaces. Its cast counterpart is fully dense (no porosity) and consists of Cr dendrites embedded in a Cu matrix. Monotonic and interrupted tensile tests coupled with EBSD analyses have been conducted. 2D crystal plasticity simulations have been run using the EBSD data collected in the undeformed microstructures as inputs. The model is first validated on the cast material based on the stress-strain tensile response and EBSD measurements performed after different strain increments. Then, we investigate numerically the effect of different microstructural features (initial dislocation density in the Cu matrix, matrix porosity, interfacial porosity, phase fraction, and Cr-phase morphology) on the mechanical response of the sintered composite. The intention is to discriminate the contribution of the different microstructural features on the mechanical response of Cu-Cr composites. This numerical strategy is necessary, because it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to isolate the role of different microstructural features using experiments. We show that the two main contributors to the mechanical response of the sintered composite are the initial dislocation density present in the Cu matrix, and the interfacial pores. On the contrary matrix pores have a minor effect on the mechanical response.
