Automotive Steels
Automotive Steels
Automotive Steels
Steels
Conventional HSS
Advanced HSS
IF steels
Mild Steels
C-Mn Steels
HSLA steels
DP Steels
PFHT Steels
CP Steels
TRIP Steels
TWIP steels
The soft ferrite phase is generally continuous, giving these steels excellent ductility. When these steels deform, strain is concentrated in the lower-strength ferrite phase surrounding the islands of martensite, creating the unique high work-hardening rate exhibited by these steels.
This Figure compares the engineering stress-strain curve for HSLA steel to a DP steel curve of similar yield strength. The DP steel exhibits higher initial work hardening rate, higher UTS, and lower YS/TS ratio than the similar yield strength HSLA. Thus,the work hardening rate plus excellent elongation creates DP steels with much higher UTS than conventional steels of similar yield strength.
TRIP steels
Microstructure is retained austenite embedded in a primary matrix of ferrite. In addition to a minimum of five volume percent of retained austenite, hard phases such as martensite and bainite are present in varying amounts. TRIP steels typically require the use of an isothermal hold at an intermediate temperature, which produces some bainite. The higher silicon and carbon content of TRIP steels also result in significant volume fractions of retained austenite in the final structure. TRIP steels use higher quantities of carbon than DP steels to obtain sufficient carbon content for stabilizing the retained austenite phase to below ambient temperature. Higher contents of silicon and/or aluminium accelerate the ferrite/bainite formation. Suppressing the carbide precipitation during bainitic transformation appears to be crucial for TRIP steels. Silicon and aluminium are used to avoid carbide precipitation in the bainite region.
During deformation, the dispersion of hard second phases in soft ferrite creates a high work hardening rate, as observed in the DP steels. However, in TRIP steels the retained austenite also progressively transforms to martensite with increasing strain, thereby increasing the work hardening rate at higher strain levels.
In this figure,engineering stress-strain behaviour of HSLA, DP and TRIP steels of approximately similar yield strengths are compared. The TRIP steel has a lower initial work hardening rate than the DP steel, but the hardening rate persists at higher strains where work hardening of the DP begins to diminish.
TWIP steels
High manganese content (17-24%) that causes the steel to be fully austenitic at room temperatures. A large amount of deformation is driven by the formation of deformation twins. The twinning causes a high value of the instantaneous hardening rate (n value) as the microstructure becomes finer and finer. The resultant twin boundaries act like grain boundaries and strengthen the steel. TWIP steels combine extremely high strength with extremely high stretchability. The n value increases to a value of 0.4 at an approximate engineering strain of 30% and then remains constant until both uniform and total elongation reach 50%. The tensile strength is higher than 1000 Mpa.