摘要
Toughness is an important property for steels used in engineering applications. However, recent toughness testing has shown the existence of a significant fluctuation in toughness in a single rolled plate of titanium micro-alloyed steel. The underlying causes of this fluctuation were investigated by fractography, analysis of microstructure and measurement of inclusions. Coarse and distributed TiN inclusions were responsible for the toughness variation, as they tended to act as the potential cleavage initiators to form micro-cracks. From a calculation of the local fracture stress, the critical size of coarse TiN inclusions for dominating micro-crack propagation was 4.93 μm, and similarly that of ferrite grains was 36.6μm. Under current casting and thermo-mechanically controlled processing schedules, the toughness fluctuation of rolled steel plates can be primarily attributed to the fraction of coarse TiN inclusions larger than 5μm. A corresponding relationship between impact energy and the proportion of coarse TiN inclusions was established. Finally, a normalizing treatment was applied to refine the ferrite grains of rolled steel plates. Despite the presence of coarse TiN inclusions, this refinement in ferrite grains minimized the toughness fluctuation and improved the uniformity of the impact properties of the steel plates.
Toughness is an important property for steels used in engineering applications. However, recent toughness testing has shown the existence of a significant fluctuation in toughness in a single rolled plate of titanium micro-alloyed steel. The underlying causes of this fluctuation were investigated by fractography, analysis of microstructure and measurement of inclusions. Coarse and distributed TiN inclusions were responsible for the toughness variation, as they tended to act as the potential cleavage initiators to form micro-cracks. From a calculation of the local fracture stress, the critical size of coarse TiN inclusions for dominating micro-crack propagation was 4.93 μm, and similarly that of ferrite grains was 36.6μm. Under current casting and thermo-mechanically controlled processing schedules, the toughness fluctuation of rolled steel plates can be primarily attributed to the fraction of coarse TiN inclusions larger than 5μm. A corresponding relationship between impact energy and the proportion of coarse TiN inclusions was established. Finally, a normalizing treatment was applied to refine the ferrite grains of rolled steel plates. Despite the presence of coarse TiN inclusions, this refinement in ferrite grains minimized the toughness fluctuation and improved the uniformity of the impact properties of the steel plates.
基金
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China （NSFC, Grant Nos. 51374260, 51504048 and 51611130062）. The authors thank the members of Laboratory of Metallurgy and Materials, Chongqing University, for the support of this work.
