High-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steels were fabricated by varying thermomechanical processing conditions such as rolling and cooling conditions in the intercritical region, and the low-temperature toughening mechanism was investigated in terms of microstructure and the associated grain boundary characteristics. The steels acceleratedly cooled to relatively higher temperature had lower tensile strength than those acceleratedly cooled to room temperature due to the increased volume fraction of granular bainite or polygonal ferrite (PF) irrespective of rolling in the intercritical region, while the yield strength was dependent on intercritical rolling, and start and finish cooling temperatures, which affected the formation of PF and low-temperature transformation phases. The steel rolled in the intercritical region and cooled to 673 K (400°C) provided the best combination of high yield strength and excellent low-temperature toughness because of the presence of fine PF and appropriate mixture of various low-temperature transformation phases such as granular bainite, degenerate upper bainite (DUB), lower bainite (LB), and lath martensite (LM). Despite the high yield strength, the improvement of low-temperature toughness could be explained by the reduction of overall effective grain size based on the electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) analysis data, leading to the decrease in ductileto-brittle transition temperature (DBTT).
The effects of martensite morphology and tempering on the quasistatic and dynamic deformation behavior of dual-phase steels were investigated in this study. Dynamic torsional tests were conducted on six steel specimens, which had different martensite morphologies and tempering conditions, using a torsional Kolsky bar, and then the test data were compared via microstructures, tensile properties, and fracture mode. Bulky martensites were mixed with ferrites in the step-quenched (SQ) specimens, but small martensites were well distributed in the ferrite matrix in the intermediate-annealed (IA) specimens. Under a dynamic loading condition, the fracture mode of the SQ specimens was changed from cleavage to ductile fracture as the tempering temperature increased, whereas the IA specimens showed a ductile fracture mode, irrespective of tempering. These phenomena were analyzed in terms of a rule of mixtures applied to composites, microstructural variation, martensite softening and carbon diffusion due to tempering, and adiabatic shear-band formation.
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