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High Manganese and Aluminum Steels for the Military and Transportation Industry

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Abstract

Lightweight advanced high strength steels (AHSS) with aluminum contents between 4 and 12 weight percent have been the subject of intense interest in the last decade because of an excellent combination of high strain rate toughness coupled with up to a 17% reduction in density. Fully austenitic cast steels with a nominal composition of Fe-30%Mn-9%Al-0.9%C are almost 15% less dense than quenched and tempered Cr-Mo steels (SAE 4130) with equivalent strengths and dynamic fracture toughness. This article serves as a review of the tensile and high-strain-rate fracture properties associated mainly with silicon additions to this base composition. In the solution-treated condition, cast steels have high work-hardening rates with elongations up to 64%, room-temperature Charpy V-notch (CVN) impact energies up to 200 J, and dynamic fracture toughness over 700 kJ/m2. Silicon additions in the range of 0.59–1.56% Si have no significant effect on the mechanical properties of solution-treated steels but increased the tensile strength and hardness during aging. For steels aged at 530°C to an average hardness of 310 Brinell hardness number, HBW, increasing the amount of silicon from 1.07% to 1.56% decreased the room temperature CVN breaking energy from 92 J to 68 J and the dynamic fracture toughness from 376 kJ/m2 to 265 kJ/m2. Notch toughness is a strong function of phosphorus content, decreasing the solution-treated CVN impact toughness from 200 J in a 0.006% P steel to 28 J in a 0.07% P steel. For age-hardened steels with 1% Si, increasing levels of phosphorus from 0.001% to 0.043% decreased the dynamic fracture toughness from 376 kJ/m2 to 100 kJ/m2.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Army Research Laboratory under contracts from Battelle Memorial Institute (contract W911NF-07-D-0001) and Benet Laboratories (contract W15QKN-07-2-0004) and by the National Science Foundation’s MRSEC program (DMR-0520513) and made use of its Shared Facilities at the Materials Research Center of Northwestern University. The FEI Tecnai F20 scanning/transmission electron microscope was obtained with a Major Research Instrumentation grant from NSF under contract DMR-0922851. The authors also gratefully acknowledge Waukesha Foundry, Inc. for providing the low-phosphorous Fe-Mn-Al-C alloys and the alloys with varying Si content. The local-electrode atom-probe tomograph at the Northwestern University Center for Atom-Probe Tomography (NUCAPT) was purchased and upgraded with funding from NSF-MRI (DMR-0420532) and ONR-DURIP (N00014-0400798, N00014-0610539, and N00014-0910781) grants. Additional instrumentation at NUCAPT was supported by the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern (ISEN). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. government. The U.S. government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Technology, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

    Laura Bartlett

  2. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, USA

    David Van Aken

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  1. Laura Bartlett
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  2. David Van Aken
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Correspondence to Laura Bartlett.

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Bartlett, L., Van Aken, D. High Manganese and Aluminum Steels for the Military and Transportation Industry. JOM 66, 1770–1784 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11837-014-1068-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11837-014-1068-y

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