Abstract
The present work explored the effect of free surface on the stability of individual austenite grains in a duplex stainless steel. It was found that martensitic transformation took place automatically in the retained austenite grain when a free surface was introduced. This is due to the fact that the martensite nucleation energy barrier can be lowered to a thermally surmountable value as the strain energy induced by martensitic transformation is largely lowered when the matrix constraints were removed.
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