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Effects of β Air Cooling and Subsequent Cold Rolling on Microstructure and Hardness of Zr702 Sheet

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Abstract

In this work, a Zr702 sheet was subjected to β air cooling and then rolled to 15% reduction at room temperature, with their detailed microstructural characteristics characterized by electron channeling contrast imaging and electron backscatter diffraction techniques. Results show that after the β air cooling, the prior equiaxed grains in the as-received material are completely transformed into Widmanstätten structures featured by coarse plates with typical phase transformation misorientations between them. The subsequent 15% rolling allows both slip and twinning (especially the {10–12} type) to be activated readily, leading to significant grain refinement and the appearance of misorientation angle peaks around 3°–5° and 85°. Analyses on kernel average misorientations reveal that there exist very low residual strains in the β-air-cooled specimen while they are markedly increased after the 15% rolling and preferably distributed near low-angle and twin boundaries. Hardness measurements show that the specimen hardness is evidently decreased from ~ 199 to ~ 170 HV after the β air cooling, which can be attributed to grain coarsening and the scattered orientations associated with the slow β → α transformation. For the 15%-rolled specimen, however, effective grain refinement by twinning and denser low-angle boundaries jointly lead to ~ 35% hardness increment to ~ 228 HV.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fundamental and Cutting-Edge Research Plan of Chongqing (cstc2018jcyjAX0299 and cstc2017jcyjAX0114) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51601075).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Materials Science and Engineering, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing, 400054, China

    Haotian Guan, Linjiang Chai, Yufan Zhu, Yueyuan Wang, Qin Huang & Ke Chen

  2. Chongqing Yufeng Wire and Cable Co., Ltd, Chongqing, 402260, China

    Lingguo Zeng & Zhijun Li

  3. School of Science, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Zhenjiang, 212003, Jiangsu, China

    Liang-yu Chen

  4. Faculty of Materials and Energy, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Ning Guo

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  1. Haotian Guan
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Guan, H., Zeng, L., Li, Z. et al. Effects of β Air Cooling and Subsequent Cold Rolling on Microstructure and Hardness of Zr702 Sheet. Met. Mater. Int. 27, 384–391 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12540-019-00430-z

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