Papers by Keyword: Carbide Morphology

Abstract: The cold formability of ferritic-pearlitic steels is one of the base parameters for material choice for different forming parts. One of the key factors is the pearlite morphology, which is strongly dependent on chemical composition and previous treatment history. The carbides in pearlite occur mainly in the lamellar form. One of the ways of improving the ductility along with formability is the change of lamellar carbides to globular carbides. This can be conventionally done by soft annealing, which is characterised by long processing times and high energy costs. This paper presents a new processing modification which can lead on the one hand to significant shortening of carbide spheroidization times and on the other hand to intensive refinement of grain size even for low-carbon steels. Low temperature thermomechanical treatment with variation of the heating temperature around A_c1 and incremental deformation was examined on low carbon plain RSt-32 steel. After the thermomechanical treatment conditions were optimized, the refinement of the ferritic grains from an initial 30 μm to circa 5 μm took place, and the time necessary for carbide spheroidization was shortened from several hours to several seconds.

Abstract: In this study, mechanical degradations in 2.25Cr-1Mo steel were evaluated by quantitative morphological analysis of carbides. Based on the morphology, carbides were classified as globular, fine acicular, rod, and grain boundary one. Mean size of carbides were determined as a function of morphology and thermal degradation time at 630°C. Area fraction of grain boundary carbides and fraction of grain boundary M6C carbides were observed to increase rapidly in the initial stage of degradation and then gradually afterwards. Both mean size of globular carbide and fraction of grain boundary M6C carbides were linearly correlated with strength. Potentials of carbide morphology analysis as a health monitoring technique were discussed, in term of correlation coefficient with strength.