A Method For Producing Spheroidized Or Non Lamellar Microstructure Steels
Abstract:
The present disclosure discloses a method for producing high strength hot rolled steel. The method includes casting a steel slab of a composition, comprising in weight%: carbon (C) of about 0.45 wt.% – 1.2 wt.%, manganese (Mn) of about 0.0 -1.0 wt.%, silicon (Si) of about 0.0-0.5 wt.%, niobium (Nb) up-to 0.03 wt.%, sulphur (S) up-to 0.05 wt.% of S, phosphorous (P) up-to 0.05 wt.%, nitrogen (N) 0.002 wt.% - 0.012 wt.% and balance being Iron (Fe) optionally along with incidental elements. The method also involves, heating, hot rolling, cooling, coiling the steel and retaining the steel at an ambient temperature to produce high strength hot rolled steel with 75 - 95% spheroid microstructure and 5 - 25% pearlite microstructure.
Fig. 1 is the representative figure.
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Notices, Deadlines & Correspondence
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
2. M. B. N. Raju
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
3. Pankaj Raju
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
4. Basavaraj P Kalinganavar
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
5. V.K. Shah
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
6. Monojit Dutta
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
7. Avtar Singh Saini
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
8. Sanjay Chandra
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
9. Vinay V. Mahashabde
C/o Tata Steel Limited, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831001, India
Specification
Description:TECHNICAL FIELD
Present disclosure relates in general to a field of material science and metallurgy. Particularly, but not exclusively, the present disclosure relates to a method of producing high strength hot rolled steel. Further, embodiments of the disclosure disclose the method for producing high strength hot rolled steel that comprises 75 - 95% spheroid microstructure and 5 - 25% pearlite microstructure.
BACKGROUND OF THE DISCLOSURE
Steel is an alloy of iron, carbon, and other elements such as Phosphorous (P), Sulphur (S), Nitrogen (N), Manganese (Mn), Silicon (Si), Chromium (Cr), etc. Because of its high tensile strength and low cost, steel may be considered as a most viable choice for major components manufacturing in a wide variety of applications. Some of the applications of the steel may include buildings, ships, tools, automobiles, machines, bridges, and numerous other applications.
Steel may be generally manufactured as steel slabs by processes such as casting including but not limiting to continuous casting, and then the steel is formed into various shapes depending on the application. One such common form of steel is a steel sheet which is obtained by converting the steel slab into steel sheet by series of metal forming processes to find its use in the sheet metal industry. During drawing of the steel sheet from steel slabs, processes such as hot rolling and cold rolling are carried out.
Conventionally, hot rolling may be performed in a Hot Strip Mill (HSM) which is an integral part of an integrated steel plant. The primary objective of HSM is to make strips from slabs and acquire intended properties in the strips. Typically, HSM has two sections- Roughing Mill and Finishing Mill. Roughing Mill is essentially a single strand reversing mill whose function is to reduce the thickness of the slabs as well as break the cast structure. After roughing, strips go into the finishing mill. The job of a finishing mill is to reduce the thickness of the strips and incorporates requisite properties into the strips. Thus, the HSM may process the slabs into strips and the various operational parameters of the HSM may influence the properties or the microstructure of the strip. The slabs are generally processed by the HSM to obtain the strip with a eutectoid and hypo/hyper-eutectoid steels containing pearlite. Pearlite is a two phased lamellar structure composed of alternative layers of ferrite and cementite. The strips with the pearlite microstructure may be used for producing various products like cutting saws, automotive components (Circlips, Washers, Springs, and Recliner, Driven and disc plate, clutch plates, chain links, telescopic front fork of two-wheelers and bearings), gardening tools, surgical blade, springs, measuring devices, wire rods, tire bead wires, deep drawn high strength wires, wires for suspension bridges, and others.
The pearlite microstructure in any strip often imparts hardness and strength to the strip. However, the strip with perlite microstructure is not particularly tough or ductile and has very low machinability. Low ductility makes it difficult to shape or machine the hot rolled pearlitic or high carbon steels during the process of manufacturing a component. Consequently, the pearlitic steel must be heat treated into a softened condition or spheroidized condition. The steel may be subsequently machined after the heat treatment. The steels having microstructures consisting largely of lamellar pearlite, are frequently subjected to heat treatment for changing the distribution of the carbides from a lamellar to a non-lamellar or spheroidal form. The non-lamellar or spheroidal form in the steels improve machineability, cold rolling or bending properties, ductility and toughness as measured by tensile and notch impact tests. The spheroidal form also decreases hardenability of the steels. As mentioned above, the steels with pearlitic structure must be subjected to an intermediate heat treatment steps to impart the spheroid structure suitable for machining with properties of cold rolling, ductility, toughness etc. Consequently, the overall operation costs and the time consumed for processing the slab to the strip with spheroid structure increases.
Conventionally, the steel industry has relied on two methods for imparting the spheroidal structure to the steel. The first step involves heat-treatment with a very long heating period at a temperature near the eutectoid transformation or alternately just above and just below the critical temperature, followed by slow cooling to room temperature. The second method is the quench and temper treatment. The steel in this method is quenched in oil from a temperature appreciably above the eutectoid temperature, followed by tempering for a long time at a temperature not far below the eutectoid temperature. Further, expensive microalloying additions such as titanium, vanadium, molybdenum etc., are used in conventional methods to obtain the required spheroidal structure.
Korean patent “KR100722390B1” discloses a method of producing the spheroidized structure in medium carbon steel by quenching hot rolled sheet to obtain mixture of bainite and martensite and then tempering the steel to obtain fine spheroids of cementite. However, the method disclosed in the above patent requires an additional heat treatment step for spheroidization that incurs additional time and cost. PCT publication number “WO2006088019A1” discloses the production of medium carbon wire rods with spheroidized cementite microstructure. The method involves multiple steps to produce the final product. The first step involves coiling the hot formed wire to a temperature above the eutectoid temperature, followed by cooling at a specific cooling rate to about 400 – 550oC. The wire is subsequently subjected to an isothermal treatment at that temperature and is finally cooled to a room temperature to obtain hot rolled wire with complex microstructure. The hot rolled wire is further cold rolled and annealed to obtain spheroidized cementite from the complex microstructure and cold deformation. The above process for imparting the spheroidized structure to the wire is rather expensive and complex.
The existing methods for imparting the spheroidized structure to steel either disclose prolonged isothermal treatment or involve complex heat treatment steps at high temperatures which drastically increases the overall operational time and cost. The above disclosed existing methods are also not economical for the mass production of steel with the spheroidized structure.
The present disclosure is directed to overcome one or more limitations stated above or any other limitation associated with the conventional arts.
SUMMARY OF THE DISCLOSURE
One or more shortcomings of the prior art are overcome by a method and a product as claimed and additional advantages are provided through the method as described in the present disclosure.
Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniques of the present disclosure. Other embodiments and aspects of the disclosure are described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimed disclosure.
In one non limiting embodiment of the disclosure, a method for producing high strength hot rolled steel is disclosed. The method includes casting a steel slab of a composition, comprising in weight%: carbon (C) of about 0.3 wt.% – 1.5 wt.%, manganese (Mn) of about 0.0 -1.0 wt.%, silicon (Si) of about 0.0-0.5 wt.%, niobium (Nb) up-to 0.03 wt.%, sulphur (S) up-to 0.05 wt.% of S, phosphorous (P) up-to 0.05 wt.%, nitrogen (N) 0.002 wt.% - 0.012 wt.% and balance being Iron (Fe) optionally along with incidental elements. The method also involves, hot rolling the steel slab at a temperature ranging from Ae3 to Ae3 + 100 °C, where Ae3 is the temperature at which transformation of austenite to ferrite starts at equilibrium and strain accumulation takes place during at least two strands of hot rolling. The steel is further cooled to a coiling temperature at a cooling rate of 5 °C/s - 40°C/s. Further, the steel is coiled at the coiling temperature and is retained at an ambient temperature for 1 – 24 hr to obtain high strength hot rolled steel, where the high strength hot rolled steel is formed and comprises of 75 - 95% spheroid or non-lamellar microstructure with 5 - 25% pearlite microstructure.
In an embodiment, the high-strength hot-rolled steel exhibits ultimate tensile strength greater than 950 MPa.
In an embodiment, the austenitizing temperature ranges from 1100 °C to 1250 °C and the first pre-determined time ranges from 20 minutes to 4 hours.
In an embodiment, the Ae3 temperature ranges from of about 710 ?C to about 940 ?C.
In an embodiment, the strain accumulation during the at least two strands of hot rolling is achieved by controlling parameters including strain rate, finish rolling temperature and a desired austenite grain size during the hot rolling.
In an embodiment, the at least two strands are the last two stands of hot rolling. In an embodiment, the parameters are determined by calculating a peak strain for hot rolling the steel to achieve a desired austenite grain size in the steel.
In an embodiment, the coiling temperature is Ae1-175
Documents
Application Documents
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Name
Date
1
202131004493-STATEMENT OF UNDERTAKING (FORM 3) [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
2
202131004493-REQUEST FOR EXAMINATION (FORM-18) [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
3
202131004493-POWER OF AUTHORITY [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
4
202131004493-FORM-8 [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
5
202131004493-FORM 18 [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
6
202131004493-FORM 1 [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
7
202131004493-DRAWINGS [02-02-2021(online)].pdf
2021-02-02
8
202131004493-DECLARATION OF INVENTORSHIP (FORM 5) [02-02-2021(online)].pdf