Grain Refinement and Texture Change in Interstitial Free Steels after Severe Rolling and Ultra-short Annealing

Abstract

A Ti-stabilized interstitial free steel was highly cold deformed to a reduction of 95% and subsequently submitted to extremely short annealing cycles with heating rates varying between 300°C/s and 4500°C/s followed by water quench at various temperatures. The microstructural and textural development was studied through various consecutive stages: partially recrystallized, fully recrystallized and after α→γ→α transformation. It was found that irrespective of the heating rate the recrystallization has completely terminated before the onset of the ferrite to austenite phase transformation. In the fully recrystallized condition, ultra-rapid heating gave rise to substantially refined structures with an average ferrite grain size of 6 μm. It was also observed that this grain refinement saturates with heating rates beyond 1000°C/s.The transformation structures obtained by ultra fast heating to temperatures in the full austenite region exhibited remarkably coarser grains than the ones observed after ferrite annealing. This coarsening effect was attributed to the effects of heterogeneous nucleation during phase transformation as C was initially present as TiC precipitates in the ferrite matrix.With regard to the texture formation, the characteristic {111} deep drawing fibre of cold rolled IF steels was observed, irrespective of the heating rate, in an annealing treatment as short as 0.3 s. After the forward and reverse α→γ transformation, the ensuing ferrite texture displayed a strong memory effect, as the {111} fibre was even more intense after the double transformation than before.