Abstract
Manganese is present in all commercial low alloy steels, but its various effects on fracture are not completely understood. In this paper we report a study of the fracture behavior of quenched and tempered manganese steels. The steels were austenitized, quenched, and then tempered at temperatures between 150 °C and 500 °C. If the steel contained phosphorous, the fracture energy after all tempering treatments was very low and the fracture was intergranular. Tempering at temperatures near 350 °C produced especially low fracture energies because of the occurrence of intergranular tempered martensite embrittlement. Manganese does not increase the amount of phosphorous segregation during austenitization or tempering. However, it may increase the embrittling potency of phosphorous. If the steel did not contain a sufficient concentration of a grain boundary embrittling element such as phosphorous, the fracture mode was ductile microvoid coalescence. In this case manganese can be very important because it scavenges all of the residual sulfur in the alloy to form MnS precipitates. These are the initial sites of microvoid formation during ductile fracture, and their presence, especially in the form of elongated stringers, can lead to a reduced fracture energy.
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