High-density chemical interface mediated intragranular ferrite transformation for refining microstructure of twin-roll strip-casting HSLA steel
摘要
Castrip employs continuous casting strips typically under 2 mm in thickness, representing near-net-shape manufacturing technology. However, its inherent process constraints, including low-temperature rolling and single-pass reduction, collectively inhibit dynamic recrystallization, yielding coarse prior austenite grain size of about 386 μm. Therefore, refining the transformed microstructures during medium-/high-temperature coiling under such constraints presents a critical challenge. A novel approach leveraging solute-segregated chemical interfaces as the nucleation sites to trigger the intragranular ferrite transformation was introduced for industrial Castrip low-alloyed high-strength steel. The solute-segregated chemical gradients (0.85–4.0 wt.%) formed during the fast solidification process, where the primary dendrite arm spacings were below 30 μm and secondary dendrite arm spacings concentrated 5–6 μm. Although the chemical interfaces of Mn segregation accelerated the ferrite growth kinetics, it finally refined the transformed microstructures under medium-to-high temperature (650 °C) coiling, achieving the refined ferrite grain size of ~ 10 μm, which is similar to that manufactured by the conventional rolling process. This interface-driven phase transformation refinement behavior provides a new strategy for materials design.