Relation between microstructures of martensite and prior austenite in 12 wt% Cr ferritic steel

Abstract

Tempered martensitic 9–12 wt% Cr ferritic steels are used as heat resistant materials in power plant, where service under conditions of high temperature and pressure for several decades is required, and an adequate resistance to creep is one of the key requirements. In this type of steels, failure has been found to occur preferentially at prior austenite grain boundaries if the prior austenite grains are coarse. It appears that the prior austenite grain boundaries can act as a site of especial weakness in the tempered martensitic microstructure. It would therefore be useful to investigate whether the properties of prior austenite grain boundaries could be modified by some appropriate thermomechanical processing method. One approach to this is to attempt to increase the fraction of annealing twins in the austenite phase and to investigate whether this has an effect on the properties of the martensite after transformation and tempering. In this study, thermomechanical treatments involving hot-rolling have been applied and the fraction of austenite twins produced determined using electron backscatter diffraction analysis. The treatment giving the highest fraction of austenite twins was identified and the effect of the increase in twin fraction on the characteristics of the martensite was investigated. It was found that the fraction of coincidence site lattice boundaries in martensite along prior austenite grain boundaries increased with increasing fraction of prior austenite twin boundaries.