EBSD Study of the Effect of Hot Deformation on Low Carbon Bainitic Structure

Abstract

The effect of deformation temperature (DT) and thickness reduction on the bainitic structure was investigated under various test conditions by using hot compression on a Gleeble-1500 thermo-mechanical simulation machine, and electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) technique. In the case of the bainitic structure consisting of granular bainite (GB), lath bainite (LB) and a little ferrite (AF) under the given deformation conditions, DT and thickness reduction have remarkable effect on the transformation kinetics, starting temperature (B) of bainite fast transformation, and the type of bainitic structure. With the decreasing of DT from 810 °C to 730 °C, the starting temperature of transformation B increase from 585 °C to 595 °C. When the thickness reduction was 0 % and 20 %, the microstructure consists of GB, LB and a little AF, whereas as the thickness reduction increase to 40 %, large grain size of LB and GB disappear, and only AF and M/A remained. With the thickness reduction increases from 0 % to 40 %, the effective grain size decreases from 4 μm to 2 μm, and the fraction of HGB increases from 48 % to 57 %.