Industrial Application of Thixomet Image Analyzer for Quantitative Description of Steel and Alloy's Microstructure

Abstract

Numerous examples of practical use in industry of the Thixomet image analyzer for quantitative description of the microstructure of steels and alloys have been described. More than 200 image analyzers have been installed at Universities, R&D labs, and plants during the twenty years of the Thixomet’s history. Sixty-five Thixomet plug-ins cover all Russian and most of International standards. The techniques of quantitative description of non-metallic inclusions, grain size, and all kinds of microstructural inhomogeneity in modern pipeline steels (such as microstructure banding, general anisotropy, blocks of a bainite with lath morphology, centerline segregation) have been developed, realized, and put into practice as a motorized hardware–software complex, Thixomet SmartDrive, at many enterprises. It was established that structural inhomogeneity evaluated by volume fraction and a blocks length of a bainite with lath morphology elongated along the rolling direction adequately described the mechanical properties of pipeline steels. The name of Thixomet was taken because of Greek “Thixis” (touch) and “Metrisi” (measurement), so an idea is “One Touch Measurement.” Measurement operations from capturing an image up to a generation of quantitative description of a structure as a report are actually performed by several evident actions that confirm the name of the product. Thixomet has succeeded in international interlaboratory Round Robin Test Programs and performed with the good results across worldwide Image Analysis systems. This was a cause to get an official metrological certificate from Russian State Metrological Committee which certified Thixomet as a measurement tool.