Hot Deformation Behavior of an Fe-Al Alloy Steel in Two Phase Region

Abstract

The Thin Slab Cast Direct Rolling (TSCDR) process offers several economic and environmental advantages. The elimination of slab reheating and roughing deformation, however, leave fewer opportunities for grain refinement and some large grains persist in the microstructure. To solve this problem, a new chemistry which leads to a two-phase mixture of ferrite and austenite over a wide temperature range was introduced by Zhou et al. The two phase mixture is highly resistant to grain coarsening leading to a small initial grain size compared with the grain size of conventional TSCDR slab. In addition, ferrite and austenite co-exist over wide range of temperature in many third generation steels, making it extremely important to understand the hot deformation behavior of these materials, which have traditionally received less attention in the literature. In order to investigate the microstructure evolution of ferrite-austenite mixtures during thermomechanical processing, an Al containing model alloy, for which the two phases co-exist over a wide temperature range, was designed. Two types of experiments were carried out: the first involved single hit hot compression tests; and the second involved stress relaxation tests. According to the microstructure observation the main change of austenite microstructure under deformation conditions was a decrease in the spacing of the austenite particles within the ferrite matrix. In other words the austenite phase behaved as hard particles inside a soft ferrite matrix. Hot deformation led to the static recrystallization of the ferrite matrix. The most favourable nucleation sites were in the vicinity of the old grain boundaries and the around austenite particles. The recovery and recrystallization kinetics of ferrite were analyzed using the stress relaxation test. Based on analysis of the stress relaxation tests, more than 95% of stored energy was consumed by recovery, while static recrystallization consumed less than 5% of the stored energy. The retardation of recrystallization in the model alloy is attributed to both the high rate of recovery in BCC materials and texture effects.