On the Microstructural Characteristics of UFG Microalloyed Steel Influencing the Mechanical Behavior under Dynamic Loading

This paper presents a summary of a preliminary research aimed at producing ultrafine-grained (UFG) and heterogeneous microstructure in microalloyed steel and testing these materials under dynamic loading conditions (strain rates 800 s-1 and 1800s-1). The UFG and bimodal-structures, due to grain size, structural composition or morphology of structural components, were produced by an advanced thermomechanical processing, namely rolling in: hot, two-phase and cold-hot combined conditions. The advantage of bimodal microstructures is their maximization of mechanical behavior under extreme loading conditions due to promoted accumulation and interactions of geometrically necessary dislocations. The dynamic work-hardening behavior has been studied as a function of solute atoms and fine-scale, second-phase particles in the UFG and bimodal-structures. The substantial complexity of the phenomena, which occur through the evolution of microstructure and texture in response to dynamic loading, presents formidable challenges to theoretical model development of plastic deformation of UFG and bimodal-structures. Such an extraordinary work hardening provides an attractive strategy to develop optimal combination of mechanical properties i.e. strength/ductility ratio. A multi-scale analysis capable of including material behavior in different scales should be applied to discuss mechanical response of mentioned above microstructures and to help to analyze their influence on mechanical behavior under dynamic loading. The investigation was performed for a material of common application: high strength microalloyed steel X70. The experimental results show that strain rate sensitivity of the heterogeneous microstructures obtained by various thermomechanical rolling routes are significant, but not by a similar magnitude with the microstructure compositions and increasing strain rate.