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Effect of precipitates on grain growth in non-oriented silicon steel

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Abstract

Precipitates and grain sizes in non-oriented silicon steel samples, which were hot-rolled (HR), continuously annealed (CA), and stress-relief-annealed (SA), were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) equipped with electron back-scattered diffraction. The average grain sizes of the HR, CA, and SA samples were 28, 46, and 46 μm, respectively. SEM observations revealed that the precipitates were mainly dispersed inside grains in the HR and the CA samples, but mainly at grain boundaries in the SA sample. The density of precipitates was highest in the SA sample and lowest in the HR sample. Precipitates at the grain boundaries, which were identified as manganese sulfides, were nearly spherical, their diameter ranging from 0.3 to 0.7 μm. We calculated the pining force exerted by grain-boundary precipitates and found that it outweighed the driving force of the grain growth that was controlled by boundary curvature.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1460103). We thank Dr. Han in the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory of USA for insights, Dr. Tyler for editing, and the Instrumental Analysis & Research Center in Shanghai University for support.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Special Steel & Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced Ferrometallurgy & School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200072, China

    Fangjie Li, Huigai Li, Yuan Wu, Dan Zhao, Bowen Peng, Shaobo Zheng & Jinglin You

  2. Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai, 201800, China

    Hefei Huang

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  1. Fangjie Li
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Li, F., Li, H., Wu, Y. et al. Effect of precipitates on grain growth in non-oriented silicon steel. Journal of Materials Research 32, 2307–2314 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2017.115

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