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Surface grain boundary engineering in 304 stainless steel by means of mechanical grinding treatment-induced gradient plastic strain and annealing

  • Metals & corrosion
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Abstract

Grain boundary engineering (GBE) has shown a promising application in improving resistance to intergranular corrosion (IGC) of polycrystalline metallic materials with low-stacking fault energy, such as austenitic stainless steels. However, the traditionally uniform plastic pre-straining methods, such as cold rolling, in thermomechanical processing are hard to implement on complicated surfaces. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach using gradient plastic strain induced by surface mechanical grinding treatment with a rotary tool and subsequent annealing to optimize grain boundary character distribution (GBCD) in the near-surface layer. The gradient plastic strain followed by long-time annealing (24–96 h) in 304 stainless steels achieved an optimized GBCD with over 75% frequency of coincidence site lattice (CSL) boundaries and disconnected random boundary network in the near-surface layer. The intergranular corrosion tests showed that the resulting 304 stainless steels with the optimized GBCD in the near-surface layer present an excellent resistance to IGC behavior due to a high fraction of \(\Sigma {3^\mathrm{{n}}}\) boundaries. During the annealing process, severe plastic strain near the surface results in small size grain clusters via strain recrystallization, while low-level plastic strain in the subsurface promotes the formation of high fraction of CSL boundaries and large size grain clusters via strain-induced boundary migration. After the complete depletion of gradient plastic strain, the directional growth of grain clusters promotes the further extension of surface GBE into interior region. Thus, the thickness of surface GBE region can be regulated by the annealing time.

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The data supporting the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51875219] and the Scientific Research Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (grant number Q20239404).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Xinli Jiang, Chongwen Yang & Xuelin Wang

  2. Hubei Key Laboratory of Modern Manufacturing Quality Engineering, School of Mechanical Engineering, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Wenqian Zhang

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  1. Xinli Jiang
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Xinli Jiang contributed to conceptualization, methodology, software, writing—original draft. Chongwen Yang contributed to methodology, visualization. Wenqian Zhang contributed to software, reviewing, editing. Xuelin Wang contributed to reviewing, editing, supervision, funding acquisition.

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Correspondence to Xuelin Wang.

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Jiang, X., Yang, C., Zhang, W. et al. Surface grain boundary engineering in 304 stainless steel by means of mechanical grinding treatment-induced gradient plastic strain and annealing. J Mater Sci 57, 21798–21812 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-022-07983-2

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