A strain reversal applied both under hot or cold working produces a microstructural transient that manifests in different ways and at different scales. The evolution of the dislocation network is the result of the competition between the dissolution/dissociation of dislocation that occurs during the reversal and build-up of a new polarity network. This work proposes a phenomenological formulation based on an effective equivalent strain concept to describe, in a simple way, the several manifestations of the microstructural transient at grain and intragranular scales, and the further modification of the static recrystallization kinetics.
