Martensitic Transformation in Austenitic Stainless Steels

Abstract: Martensitic transformation is very important in austenitic stainless steels where the transformation induced plasticity phenomenon provides a combination of good mechanical properties, such as formability and strength. However, the difficulty of predicting the material behaviour is one of the major drawbacks of these steels. In order to model this behaviour it is of great importance to be able to characterize the morphology, crystallography and the amount of different types of martensite. The morphology and crystallography of thermal and deformation induced lath martensite in stainless steels were re-examined by means of optical microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique. The experiments were performed on AISI301, 304 and 204Cu austenitic stainless steels. Plastic deformation was carried out by means of uniaxial tensile tests at the strain rate of  to produce strain induced α’-martensite at a temperature ranging from 0 to 60ºC. An in-situ measurement of the martensite content was performed during the tensile testing using a Ferritescope to provide the necessary experimental values for modelling. Optical microscopy revealed the morphology of the strain induced α’-martensite as sets of thin parallel needles that go through the parent austenite grain and stop at the grain or annealing twin boundaries. Large amount of α’-martensite could be seen at the intersection of shear bands. However, considerable amount of α’-martensite was also observed when only one set of bands is activated. EBSD was successfully used to analyze the morphology and crystallography of martensite. The α’-martensite maintained the Kurdjumov-Sachs (K-S) orientation relationship with the austenite phase. Although all six possible variants did not appear within a single packet, one or two variants were often favoured out of six related to the specific {111} plane. The misorientations between the neighbouring variants were mainly <111> 60º or <110> 49.5º.