A Statistical Analysis on the Complex Inclusions in Rare Earth Element Treated Steel

Abstract

In present work the complex inclusions were investigated in the rare earth element treated steels. Based on the results of automated inclusion analysis in the La and Ce added wheel steel a post-processing method was proposed to correct the errors in size distribution, amount and chemical composition introduced by the double-threshold scan. According to the automatic result, the peaks for light-element and heavy-element inclusion were both in range of 0.14–0.53 µm, with the value of 66.5/mm² and 25.9/mm² respectively, and the results were corrected in post-processing to be 27.0/mm² and 15.9/mm² respectively. Meanwhile, the peak of number density for complex inclusion was in range of 0.9–1.3 µm with the value of 10.3/mm². The amount of complex inclusions accounted for about one third of the total. La and Ce dominated in the complex inclusions due to their large size.