Effect of Overaging on Solute Distributions and Bake Hardening Phenomenon in Bake Hardening Steels

Specimens of two different kinds of bake hardening steels （BH-Mn and BH-P） were prepared and treated with different annealing processes （water quenching and overaging）. A novel technique of three dimensional atom probe was used to investigate solute distributions in these steels. The results indicate that C concentration decreases, whereas V increases during overaging in both bake hardening steels. The conclusion that no vanadium carbides pre- cipitate during the overaging is therefore originally obtained by microanalysis in bake hardening steels. Moreover, bake hardening values of all the specimens were tested by tensile experiments with 2 0/~ pre-deformation. However, those of overaged specimens were further measured with higher levels of pre-deformation because no bake hardening phenomenon was present at 2% pre-deformation. As the pre-deformation increases from 2% to 6% and 8%, both overaged steels show bake hardening values, and the value data are almost the same.