No abstract

The so-called ausforming treatment consists in plastically deforming a fully austenitized steel below the recrystallization stop temperature, prior to either a martensitic or a bainitic transformation. Although this procedure is envisioned as a way to improve the mechanical response of the attained microstructure, it is not without its drawbacks, as the possibility of phase transformations occurring during the deformation step. When such step is applied at relatively higher temperatures than those of the aimed microstructure, the presence of those softer phases could be rather detrimental for the final microstructure. The current study aims to further study those phase transformations to analyze whether they are induced via either stress or strain and to identify the temperature ranges in which they tend to occur, so that they can be avoided or used to improve the final microstructure properties in the future. A final evaluation on the impact of these induced transformations on the final microstructure when deformation is followed by either cooling or an isothermal treatment is also performed.

Low temperature bainite consists of an intimate mixture of bainitic ferrite and retained austenite, usually obtained by isothermal treatments at temperatures close to the martensite start temperature and below the bainite start temperature. There is widespread belief regarding the extremely long heat treatments necessary to achieve such a microstructure, but still there are no unified and objective criteria to determine the end of the bainitic transformation that allow for meaningful results and its comparison. A very common way to track such a transformation is by means of a high-resolution dilatometer. The relative change in length associated with the bainitic transformation has a very characteristic sigmoidal shape, with low transformation rates at the beginning and at end of the transformation but rapid in between. The determination of the end of transformation is normally subjected to the ability and experience of the “operator” and is therefore subjective. What is more, in the case of very long heat treatments, like those needed for low temperature bainite (from hours to days), differences in the criteria used to determine the end of transformation might lead to differences that might not be assumable from an industrial point of view. This work reviews some of the most common procedures and attempts to establish a general criterion to determine the end of bainitic transformation, based on the differential change in length (transformation rate) derived from a single experiment. The proposed method has been validated by means of the complementary use of hardness measurements, X-ray diffraction and in situ high energy X-ray diffraction.

The reason why variant selection phenomena occur in ausforming treatments is still not known. For that reason, in this work, the effect of compressive deformation on the macro and micro-texture of a bainitic microstructure was analyzed in a medium-carbon high-silicon steel subjected to ausforming treatments, where deformation was applied at 520 °C, 400 °C and 300 °C. The as-received material presented a very weak $$\left\langle {3\, 3\, 1} \right\rangle$$ 3 3 1 fiber texture along the rod axis, due to prior thermomechanical processing. For the samples isothermally heat-treated, it was detected that the bainitic ferrite inherited a $$\left\langle {1\, 0\, 0} \right\rangle$$ 1 0 0 fiber texture from the $$\left\langle {1\, 1\, 0} \right\rangle$$ 1 1 0 fiber texture present in the prior austenite. The intensity of this transformation texture was more pronounced as the deformation temperature decreased. Also, variant selection was examined at different scales by combining Electron-Backscattered Diffraction and X-ray Diffraction. The quantification of the fraction of crystallographic variants under certain conventions for every condition revealed variant selection in samples subjected to ausforming treatments, where these phenomena were stronger as the deformation temperature was lower. Finally, some of the theories proposed so far to explain these variant selection phenomena were tested, showing that variants were not selected based on their Bain group and that their selection can be better described in terms of their belonging to packets, if these are defined according to a global reference frame. This suggests that the phenomena might have to do with the effect of deformation mechanisms on the prior austenite.