Effects of strain states on stability of retained austenite in medium Mn steels

Based on uniaxial tensile and plane strain deformation tests, the effects of strain states on the stability of RA （retained austenite） in medium Mn steels, which were subjected to IA （intercritical annealing） and Q＆P （quenching and partitioning） processing, were investigated. The volume fractions of RA before and after deformation were measured at different equivalent strains. The transformation behaviors of RA were also investigated. The stability of RA differed across two different transformation stages at the plane strain state： the stability was much lower in the first stage than in the second stage. For the uniaxial ten sion strain state, the stability of RA corresponded only to a single transformation stage. The main reason was that there were two types of transformations from RA in the medium Mn steel for the plane strain state. One type was that the martensite originated in the strain-induced stacking faults （SISF）. The other type was the strain-induced directly twin martensite at a certain equivalent strain. However, for the uniax- ial tension state, only the strain-induced twin martensite was observed. Dislocation lines and dislocation tangles were also observed in specimens deformed at different strain states. In addition, complex micro- structures of stacking faults and lath-like phases were observed within a grain at the plane strain state.

An element decomposition method with variance strain stabilization

An element decomposition method with variance strain stabilization(EDM-VSS) is proposed. In the present EDM-VSS, the quadrilateral element is first divided into four sub-triangular cells, and the local strains in sub-triangular cells are obtained using linear interpolation function. For each quadrilateral element, the strain of the whole quadrilateral is the weighted average value of the local strains, which means only one integration point is adopted to construct the stiffness matrix. The stabilization item of the stiffness matrix is constructed by variance of the local strains, which can eliminate the instability of the one-point integration formulation and largely increase the accuracy of the element. Compared with conventional full integration quadrilateral element, the EDM-VSS achieves more accurate results and expends much lower computational cost. More importantly, as no mapping or coordinate transformation is involved in the present EDM-VSS, the restriction on the conventional quadrilateral elements can be removed and problem domain can be discretized in more flexible ways. To verify the accuracy and stability of the present formulation, a number of numerical examples are studied to demonstrate the efficiency of the present EDM-VSS.

Cation-mixing stabilized layered oxide cathodes for sodium-ion batteries

Sodium-ion batteries are promising for large-scale energy storage due to sodium's low cost and infinite abundance. The most popular cathodes for sodium-ion batteries, i.e., the layered sodium-containing oxides, usually exhibit reversible host rearrangement between P-type and O-type stacking upon charge/discharge. Herein we demonstrate that such host rearrangement is unfavorable and can be suppressed by introducing transition-metal ions into sodium layers. The electrode with stabilized P3-type stacking delivers superior rate capability, high energy efficiency, and excellent cycling performance. Owing to the cation-mixing nature, it performs the lowest lattice strain among all reported cathodes for sodium-ion batteries. Our findings highlight the significance of a stable host for sodium-ion storage and moreover underline the fundamental distinction in material design strategy between lithium-and sodium-ion batteries.