The Limits of Strength and Toughness in Steel
By J. Morris, Z. Guo, C. Krenn, Y. Kim. 2001
141 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The ideal structural steel combines high strength with excellent fracture toughness. In this paper we consider the limits of strength and toughness from two perspectives. The first perspective is theoretical. It has recently become possible to compute the ideal shear and tensile strengths of defect-free crystals. While the ferromagnetism of bcc Fe makes it a particularly difficult problem, we can estimate its limiting properties from those of similar materials. The expected behavior at the limit of strength contains many familiar features, including cleavage on {100}, slip on multiple planes, "conditionally" brittle behavior at low temperature and a trend away from brittle behavior on alloying with Ni. The behavior of fcc materials at the limit of strength suggests that true cleavage will not happen in austenitic steels. The results predict an ideal cleavage stress near 10.5 GPa, and a shear strength near 6.5 GPa. The second perspective is practical: how to maximize the toughness of high-strength steel. Our discussion here is limited to the subtopic that has been the focus of research in our own group: the use of thermal treatments to inhibit transgranular brittle fracture in lath martensitic steels. The central purpose of the heat treatments described here is grain refinement, and the objective of grain refinement is to limit the crystallographic coherence length for transgranular crack propagation. There are two important sources of transgranular embrittlement: thermal (or, more properly, mechanical) embrittlement at the ductile–brittle transition, and hydrogen embrittlement from improper heat treatment or environmental attack. As we shall discuss, these embrittling mechanisms use different crack paths in lath martensitic steels and, therefore, call for somewhat different remedies.
Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Metals and Alloys
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af6d55421168fafa49afbd4905a6c5b98a7f4a4e
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Current trend in offshore wind energy sector and material requirements for fatigue resistance improvement in large wind turbine support structures – A review (2019, background): “A major barrier to the successful implementation of thermomechanical processing on thick plates is that it is difficult to impart large, uniform deformation through the thickness of plate steel [99] .”