Ferrite-Martensite Steels Characterization Using Magnetic Barkhausen Noise Measurements

Abstract

Magnetic Barkhausen noise measurements have been carried out to characterize Ferrite-Martensite steels. Using thermal treatments, the volume fraction and the carbon content of martensite were varied in reasonable proportions. The results indicate that the Barkhausen noise measurements can easily allows us to distinguish the two phases, ferrite and martensite. Using a simple mixture rule, we found a good correlation between the martensite volume fraction and the Barkhausen noise amplitude. We observed that the value of the magnetic field for which the Barkhausen noise peak is obtained, correlates with the carbon content of martensite.
We demonstrated that it was possible to use Barkhausen noise measurement to determine both the relative proportion of the two phases (ferrite and martensite) and the carbon content of martensite. The use of this technique could be extended to characterize industrial Dual-Phase steels.