Revealing the mechanism of extraordinary hardness without compensating the toughness in a low alloyed high carbon steel

Abstract

there is a continuous quest for discovery of a steel grade which has better properties and lower production cost. to design steel with superior properties for industrial application, it is essential to understand the effect of microstructure and engineer it to fit the purpose. In this study, a counter intuitive strategy has used to reveal the mechanism of high carbon steel with ultrahard structure. High compact force has been used to produce a structure which has ceramic-like hardness without compensating the toughness significantly. The behaviour of high carbon low-alloy steel as the starting material under different stages of deformation has been studied to differentiate various deformation paths and microstructural transformation processes. Microscopy investigation by secondary electron microscopy, high-resolution electron backscattered diffraction (HR-EBSD) analysis and Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) showed that the key point to achieve ~75% increased hardness in this steel is through generation of nano-structured martensite of less than 50 nm grains size which can be formed due to high impact force. in this paper, we reveal a nano grained steel structure with excellent mechanical properties resulting from phase transformation, uniform dislocation distribution, grain refinement and recrystallization.

Effect of Heat Input on Austenite Reversion, Recrystallization, and Ensuing Impact Toughness in Simulated Intercritical Coarse‐Grained Heat Affected Zone of Medium Mn Steel

“…This result was also verified by Liu et al [ 52 ] Furthermore, the formation of twining can promote the collaborative deformation by adding extra slip systems and become a booster to transfer between present slip systems throughout dislocation‐twin interactions. [ 53,54 ] High dislocation density was observed between the twins, which is shown in Figure 7f. With the heat input further increasing to 50 kJ cm −1 , there were extremely small amounts of austenite remained and accompanied by coarse martensitic laths.…”

EXSCLAIM!: Harnessing materials science literature for self-labeled microscopy datasets

“…Conversely, the abstract labels are free to draw additional relevant words from the abstract text, and the topic labels come from the human-assigned topic names from the statistical topic summaries. Citations for image-caption text are (A) Pujala and Dhara, 56 (B) Wang et al., 57 (C) Zhuang et al., 58 (D) Hossain et al., 59 (E) Hong et al., 60 (F) Huang et al., 61 and (G) Kasukabe et al. 62 …”

Tensile Strength and Microstructure of Rotary Friction-Welded Carbon Steel and Stainless Steel Joints

“…This increased the hardness of the structure [47]. In low-alloy carbon steel, both deformation and phase transformation resulted in a high dislocation density [48]. Hot forming combined with quenching, partitioning, and tempering in medium-carbon steel increased the dislocation density and improved the tensile strength [49].…”