Evading the strength–ductility trade-off dilemma in steel through gradient hierarchical nanotwins

By Yujie Wei, Yongqiang Li, L. Zhu, Yaowen Liu, X. Lei, Gang Wang, Yanxin Wu, Z. Mi, Jiabin Liu, Hongtao Wang and 1 more. Nature Communications, 2014

1,024 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The strength–ductility trade-off has been a long-standing dilemma in materials science. This has limited the potential of many structural materials, steels in particular. Here we report a way of enhancing the strength of twinning-induced plasticity steel at no ductility trade-off. After applying torsion to cylindrical twinning-induced plasticity steel samples to generate a gradient nanotwinned structure along the radial direction, we find that the yielding strength of the material can be doubled at no reduction in ductility. It is shown that this evasion of strength–ductility trade-off is due to the formation of a gradient hierarchical nanotwinned structure during pre-torsion and subsequent tensile deformation. A series of finite element simulations based on crystal plasticity are performed to understand why the gradient twin structure can cause strengthening and ductility retention, and how sequential torsion and tension lead to the observed hierarchical nanotwinned structure through activation of different twinning systems. It is a long-standing goal in metallurgy to enhance the strength of materials without sacrificing ductility. Here, the authors demonstrate that applying pre-torsion to a twinning-induced plasticity steel generates a hierarchical nanotwin structure, improving strength whilst retaining ductility.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0acbbfe7442a73a056e55f1e7464eac85cb3bfea

How researchers see this paper

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In Materials Chemistry

1. Yuntian Zhu
2. Xiaolei Wu
3. I. Ovid’ko
4. R. Valiev
5. Jian Lu
6. Chong-xiang Huang
7. Jianjun Li
8. Muxin Yang

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Yuntian Zhu
2. Xiaolei Wu
3. R. Valiev
4. I. Ovid’ko
5. Jian Lu
6. Muxin Yang
7. Jianjun Li
8. Chong-xiang Huang

In Mechanics of Materials

1. Yuntian Zhu
2. Xiaolei Wu
3. I. Ovid’ko
4. R. Valiev
5. Jian Lu
6. Jianjun Li
7. Chong-xiang Huang
8. Muxin Yang

Citations in the corpus

• Nanotwinned and hierarchical nanotwinned metals: a review of experimental, computational and theoretical efforts (2018, methodology): “a The experimental observation of HNT structures in TWIP steel cylinder.(30) b Theoretical distribution of HNT structures.”
• Understanding martensite and twin formation in austenitic steels: A model describing TRIP and TWIP effects (2017, neutral): “…an embryo with a critical width r ∗ i and length l ∗ i ; this process aids in reducing the excess stress concentration from dislocation pile-ups [22]; this arrangement is schematically shown in Figure 1 Kibey et al. [8] showed that the free energy of a twin embryo is composed by i ) the strain…”