Study of Equilibrium State in Fe-Mn-Al-C Alloys

Abstract: We are living in a world of steel. Although there are a lot of other material in use, our most used material is steel. From building industry to transportation and even mother industries like mining, we use steel in different grades and amounts. There is always need for different grades of steel, and there is always interest in better properties and lower costs. Fe-Mn-Al-C steel group is one of the grades of steel is from the TWIP family. Beside its interesting mechanical properties, its corrosion resistance and cryogenic properties makes it very desirable to substitute more expensive current classes of the steel used in the industry. The automobile industry is also looking forward to implement this family of the steel in their products. This group of steel based on their chemical content can created a carbide ordered phase called κ which is one of the reasons of its interesting mechanical properties beside the TWIP properties. While κ may give more hardness due to precipitation hardening, it will make the steel brittle. Thus we need an understanding of the phase diagram of this group of the steels in order to choose our material and process accordingly. Phase diagrams are material engineers’ road maps for the processes and material choice as the initial steps, since we can predict the processes results and stable phases based on the equilibrium state from the diagrams. As the number of components gets more than three the phase diagram calculations and determination gets harder. For the ternary alloying systems we can only show sections of the phase diagrams as isothermal sections, or consider an element constant and depict the diagram as a “binary” system for the other two alloying elements at the other element concentration. In this work, we tried to experiment on the experimental data for equilibrium phases of Fe-Mn-Al-C alloying system based on the Equilibrated Alloys for alloys containing 20, 30 and 40 weight percent Manganese. The results were compared to the current database of the Thermo-Calc software for this family and we found some inconsistencies between the experimental data and the calculations which shows that the calculated results for this alloying system with its high Mn-content, is not reliable and that the thermodynamic descriptions must be adjusted.