Abstract
The strengthening and ductilization of steels are of great importance to weight reduction of vehicles. In this work, the strength–ductility synergy of dual-phase (DP) steels was obtained by properly tailoring the structural heterogeneity, including the distribution and fraction of constituent phases. It was demonstrated that heterogeneous structural DP steels with high volume fraction of martensite (from 64 to 83%) led to a good combination of strength and ductility. Compared with the cold-rolled sheets, the tensile strength and uniform elongation of heterogeneous DP steel increased by 700 MPa (from 1.06 to 1.76 GPa) and 2.7% (from 1.3 to 4%), respectively. The contributions from back stress and effective stress were analyzed by cyclic loading–unloading experiments. The underlying deformation mechanism was discussed based on the results of mechanical test and microstructure observation.
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