Peculiarities of the formation of heterogeneous structures in carbon steels

Abstract

Obtaining a homogeneous structure and uniform-phase distribution is critical to a high set of mechanical and operational properties of rolled metal. However, in practice it is not always possible to create metal products with the specified characteristics. In order to determine the morphological features of the structure of rolled carbon steel, a comparative study of carbon steel samples with a carbon content of 0.49 % C and 0.2 % C selected from hot-rolled billets was carried out. The billets of each group were produced under the conditions of the same enterprise, with close temperature-time modes of deformation processing. The main difference was in manufacturing processes of the output continuous cast steel billets. This research shows that with identical normalized chemical composition of steel and the same thermomechanical treatment, the formation of the morphological structure features of hot-rolled steel occurs in a different way. Therefore, we can assume that the liquation, the diffusive mobility of elements is particularly influenced by the content of impurity elements and gases in steel, which leads to a different type of structures in the finished rolled metal. At the same time, these differences are observed in carbon steels with different carbon content. A sample of non-vacuumed OC grade axle steel (0.49 % C) from converter steelmaking has a more homogeneous structure without local areas of pearlite or ferrite accumulation. It was shown that the formation of ferrite rim in the microsegregation areas occurs not only in manganous sulfides, but also arises on the background of the smallest oxide inclusions. There is significant structural heterogeneity in the samples of electric steel, despite the lower sulfur content and gassiness of steel; at the same time, a dense perlite layer is formed around the sulfides. There is also a difference in steel grade 20 (0.2 % C) of different manufacturing processes. The structure is more homogeneous in qualitatively deoxidized vacuum degassed steel; no local areas with different dimensional characteristics were detected. The size of the structural elements is much larger and the structure has mostly large sections of the Widmanstatten ferrite. Since a large number of non-metallic inclusions and gassiness of steel is not a positive factor for providing a high set of properties of metal products, the modes of thermomechanical treatment used today require adjustments depending on the characteristics of steel melting. Keywords: microstructural heterogeneity, ferritic-pearlitic banding, mechanical properties, manganous sulfides.