Search Results (11)

The Ti-6242 titanium alloy samples were forged at 1020 °C (slightly above the β-transus) and subjected to ultra-short isothermal holding (0–320 s) prior to quenching to investigate the rapid microstructural evolution in the parent β phase. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) with parent β-phase reconstruction reveals that within only 1–3 s of holding, a pronounced <111> fiber texture develops along the forging axis, superseding the original <100> deformation fiber. This ultrafast texture change is attributed to metadynamic recrystallization (MDRX)—the post-deformation growth of nuclei formed during dynamic deformation. The newly formed <111>-oriented β grains still contain residual substructure, indicating incomplete strain release consistent with MDRX. Longer holds (tens of seconds) lead to more extensive static recrystallization and normal grain growth, which dilute the strong <111> fiber as grains of other orientations form and coarsen. These findings demonstrate that even a brief pause after forging can markedly alter the prior β texture via a MDRX mechanism. This insight highlights a novel approach to microtexture control in Ti-6242: by leveraging MDRX during short holds, one can potentially disrupt the formation of aligned α colony microtextured regions (MTRs, or “macrozones”) upon subsequent cooling, thereby mitigating dwell-fatigue susceptibility. The study revises the interpretation of the recrystallization mechanism in short-term holds and provides guidance for optimizing β-phase processing to improve fatigue performance. Full article

This austenitising bending investigation was carried out in a vacuum environment with the forming rates of 1, 10, and 100 mm/min under a certain bending temperature of 900 °C by a thermomechanical simulator. The enhanced strength at the accelerated forming rate and on the compression/tension zones throughout the thickness of the bent plates was discussed in detail in terms of dislocation pile-up, smaller prior austenite grain size, dynamic recrystallisation, smaller martensite packet, and stress-neutral layer. Since the simulation results were validated to match the experimental trend, this investigation could be applied as a valuable reference to simulate the practical manufacturing process of railway fasteners. Full article

A modified carbide-free bainite (CFB) steel has been developed, building on existing alloys for compatibility with commercial continuous annealing lines (CALs), featuring a low austenitization temperature and short overaging time. The microstructural features of such candidate CFB sheets are compared with those of conventional CFB steel sheets that require higher reheating temperatures and longer overaging times. The effects of annealing parameters such as reheating temperatures and overaging temperatures on phase transformation kinetics and microstructure evolution are presented. The annealing process was simulated in a Gleeble thermomechanical processing simulator, and the microstructural characterization was carried out using XRD, SEM, and EBSD. Reconstruction of parent austenite grains from EBSD data did not reveal any variant selection, regardless of changes in the austenitization temperature, overaging temperature, or carbon content. It was observed that the V1–V2 variant pairing is the most common at the lower overaging temperature for reheating at 950 °C; however, this pairing decreases as the isothermal overaging temperature increases, with variant pairings involving low misorientation boundaries—such as V1–V4 and V1–V8—becoming more frequent. Steels with higher carbon content exhibit no significant changes in their variant pairing, regardless of variations in the austenitizing or isothermal temperatures. The XRD results show that the retained austenite fraction is reduced by increasing the isothermal transformation temperature. Full article

Medium manganese (medium-Mn) steel, one of the third-generation advanced high-strength steels (AHSS), delivers impressive mechanical properties such as high yield strength, ultimate tensile strength, and uniform elongation. One notable feature of medium-Mn steels is the presence of ultrafine-grained (UFG) austenite, achieved through phase transformation from the parent martensite phase during intercritical annealing. While, in general, UFG is considered a strengthening mechanism, the impact of UFG austenites in medium-Mn steel has not been fully studied. In this manuscript, we advance our previous work on crystal plasticity simulation based on the Taylor model to consider fully resolved high-fidelity microstructures and systematically study the influence of the UFG austenites. The original microstructure with UFG is reconstructed from a set of serial electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) scans, where the exact grain morphology, orientation, and phase composition are preserved. This microstructure was further analyzed to identify the UFG austenites and recover them to their parent martensite before the intercritical annealing. These two high-fidelity microstructures are used for a comparative study using dislocation density-based crystal plasticity finite modeling to understand the impact of UFG austenites on both the local and overall mechanical responses. Full article

Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is an excellent tool for characterizing the crystallographic orientation aspects of the microstructure of polycrystalline material. In some additively manufactured materials, the material may undergo a phase transformation during the forming process. Although EBSD can only characterize the final microstructure, neighbor information from orientation mapping allows the microstructure before the phase transformation to be reconstructed, provided that the parent–child orientation relationship is known. An investigation of the effectiveness of the reconstruction algorithms for capturing the grain size as well as orientation gradients is undertaken with a focus on additively manufactured Ti-alloy. The EBSD results, coupled with reconstruction algorithms, reveal information on the prior grain size as well as the plastic flow of the material. Full article

In this work, the variant selection of martensite in a stainless maraging steel was investigated by electron backscattering diffraction and a new protocol of parent phase reconstruction. The reconstruction protocol enables digital austenite reversion into prior austenite microstructure and provides information of variant selection from a large number of austenite grains. It was found that strong variant selection occurred when the prior austenite grains were significantly refined in annealing or severely deformed by ausforming. When the prior austenite grain size was finer than 20 μm, it was found that a pair of twinned variants dominated in one packet, which dominates the prior austenite grain. This finding is explained by the inefficient space left by the early transformed martensite in the dominant packet. In contrast, variants with the same Bain orientation occupied most of the space of the austenite when the strain of the austenite exceeded 50%. The accumulated microbands on the $\left\{1 1 1\right\}$ plane acted as nucleation sites of specific variants of martensite. This work provides statistical results to revisit the variant selection of martensitic transformation with the assistance of computational crystallography. Full article

Lath martensite is a complex hierarchical compound structure that forms during rapid cooling of carbon steels from the austenitic phase. At the smallest, i.e., ‘single crystal’ scale, individual, elongated domains, form the elemental microstructural building blocks: the name-giving laths. Several laths of nearly identical crystallographic orientation are grouped together to blocks, in which–depending on the exact material characteristics–clearly distinguishable subblocks might be observed. Several blocks with the same habit plane together form a packet of which typically three to four together finally make up the former parent austenitic grain. Here, a fully parametrized approach is presented which converts an austenitic polycrystal representation into martensitic microstructures incorporating all these details. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) Representative Volume Elements (RVEs) are generated based on prior austenite microstructure reconstructed from a 2D experimental martensitic microstructure. The RVEs are used for high-resolution crystal plasticity simulations with a fast spectral method-based solver and a phenomenological constitutive description. The comparison of the results obtained from the 2D experimental microstructure and the 2D RVEs reveals a high quantitative agreement. The stress and strain distributions and their characteristics change significantly if 3D microstructures are used. Further simulations are conducted to systematically investigate the influence of microstructural parameters, such as lath aspect ratio, lath volume, subblock thickness, orientation scatter, and prior austenitic grain shape on the global and local mechanical behavior. These microstructural features happen to change the local mechanical behavior, whereas the average stress–strain response is not significantly altered. Correlations between the microstructure and the plastic behavior are established. Full article

Martensite transformation is a complex mechanism in materials that is classically initiated by a suitable heat treatment. This heat treatment process can be optimized based on a better understanding of the physical mechanisms on the length scale of several prior austenite grains. It is therefore appropriate to consider individual process steps of heat treatment in isolation. The aim of this study is to characterize the microstructural size changes caused by a variation of the cooling rate applied during the quenching process. For this purpose, individual martensitic microstructures from different heat treatments are analyzed using the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) method. With special orientation relationships between the parent austenite and martensite, the structure of the prior austenite grains and the close packet plane packets can then be reconstructed. The influence of the heat treatments on these characteristics as well as on the martensite blocks is thus quantified. No significant influence of the quenching rate on the sizes of martensite blocks and packets could be found. Full article

The complex and intricate microstructure of B19′ martensite in shape memory nickel titanium alloys is generally explained with the Phenomenological Theory of Martensitic Crystallography (PTMC). Over the last decade, we have developed an alternative approach that supposes the existence of a “natural” parent–daughter orientation relationship (OR). As the previous TEM studies could not capture the global crystallographic characteristics of the B2→B19′ transformation required to discriminate the models, we used Electron BackScatter Diffraction (EBSD) and Transmission Kikuchi Diffraction (TKD) to investigate a polycrystalline NiTi alloy composed of B19′ martensite. The EBSD maps show the large martensite plates and reveal the coexistence of different ORs. The TKD maps permit us to image the “twins” and confirm the continuum of orientations suspected from EBSD. The results are interpreted with the alternative approach. The predominant OR in EBSD is the “natural” OR for which the dense directions and dense planes of B2 and B19′ phases are parallel—i.e., (010)_B19′//(110)_B2 and [101]_B19′//[ $\overline{1}$ 11]_B2. The natural OR was used to automatically reconstruct the prior parent B2 grains in the EBSD and TKD maps. From the distortion matrix associated with this OR, we calculated that the habit plane could be (1 $\overline{1}$ 2)_B2//(10 $\overline{1}$ )_B19′. The traces of these planes are in good agreement with the EBSD maps. We interpret the other ORs as “closing-gap” ORs derived from the natural OR to allow the compatibility between the distortion variants. Each of them restores a parent symmetry element between the variants that was lost by distortion but preserved by correspondence. Full article

The microstructure of austenite at high temperatures, which cannot be reserved at room temperatures, determines the properties of its transformed phase in low-alloy steels. Consequently, an accurate method is herein developed to reconstruct local orientations of the parent austenite ( $\mathsf{\gamma }$ ) phase from electron backscatter diffraction maps of the martensite ( ${\alpha }^{\prime }$ ) microstructure. The orientation map of ${\alpha }^{\prime }$ is cropped into a grid of data squares as the reconstruction unit. The cropped square is then divided into the square inherited from only one $\mathsf{\gamma }$ grain and the square inherited from more than one $\mathsf{\gamma }$ grain. The local orientations around parent $\mathsf{\gamma }$ grain boundaries are more accurately determined using a newly proposed reconstruction criterion. Furthermore, the solution spaces for the orientation relationship and the parent $\mathsf{\gamma }$ orientation are refined, which simultaneously improves the calculation accuracy and efficiency of reconstruction procedure. The validated reconstruction method is applied to obtain local orientations of the deformed $\mathsf{\gamma }$ microstructure accurately. Full article

Crystallographic reconstruction of parent austenite grain boundaries from the martensitic microstructure in a wear resistant steel was carried out using electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD). The present study mainly aims to investigate the parent austenite grains from the martensitic structure in an as-rolled (reference) steel sample and samples obtained by quenching at different cooling rates with corresponding dilatometry. Subsequently, this study is to correlate the nearest cooling rate by the dilatometer which yields a similar orientation relationship and substructure as the reference sample. The Kurdjumov-Sachs orientation relationship was used to reconstruct the parent austenite grain boundaries from the martensite boundaries in both reference and dilatometric samples using EBSD crystallographic data. The parent austenite grain boundaries were successfully evaluated from the EBSD data and the corresponding grain sizes were measured. The parent austenite grain boundaries of the reference sample match the sample quenched at 100 °C/s (CR100). Also the martensite substructures and crystallographic textures are similar in these two samples. The results from hardness measurements show that the reference sample exhibits higher hardness than the CR100 sample due to the presence of carbides in the reference sample. Full article