Improvement of fracture toughness of forging steels microalloyed with titanium by accelerated cooling after hot working

Abstract

Ti addition is becoming common practice in the fabrication of many grades of engineering steels. In general it is used with the aim of refining the microstructure through the inhibiting effect to grain coarsening exerted by small TiN precipitates. Although a number of recommendations are made for obtaining the maximum yield of fine TiN precipitates, nonetheless a certain proportion of the precipitate volume fraction is usually in the form of coarse TiN precipitates. Several authors suggest that such coarse TiN particles are simply ineffective in pinning the grain boundaries without impairing other properties. In a recent paper it was shown that these coarse TiN particles act as cleavage nucleation sites, impairing the fracture toughness of steel with coarse ferrite-pearlite microstructures. The present work reports further fracture toughness results and fracture mechanisms for Ti treated microalloyed forging steels. They show that after hot working and accelerated cooling transforming the austenite mainly in an acicular microstructure, ductile rupture results without any cleavage nucleated in the coarse TiN particles, as occurred when the same material had a coarse ferrite-pearlite microstructure.