Effects of Inter-Critical Annealing Parameters on the Tensile Properties of Dual Phase Steels
摘要
This study explores the effects of quenching medium related to cooling rate, inter-critical heat treatment temperature and the time on the martensite volume fraction in the final microstructure of the dual-phase steel, ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and UTS-elongation product. Dark regions in the micrographs are martensite whereas bright regions are ferrite. An original code is written to detect the amounts of these phases by MATLAB. Increasing temperature has a decreasing effect on UTS whereas increasing time increased UTS. The optimum parameters for the experiments are elected as experiment 4 according to strength (UTS) –ductility (elongation) product since the maximizing the product will provide high strength together with improved ductility by Taguchi design. Furthermore, regression equations are generated for the response values to be able to guess the results for different values of parameters other than the ones used in the experiments. No significant effect of temperature was observed on the impact toughness whereas increasing cooling rate decreased toughness.