2019 Volume 105 Issue 6 Pages 629-635
Super invar cast steel, 32 mass%Ni-5 mass%Co, with an excellent low thermal expansion coefficient exhibits very low Young’s modulus due to a course solidified columnar structure with <100> austenite texture. For the improvement of the low Young’s modulus, a novel heat treatment consisted of subzero treatment and subsequent annealing was applied to stimulate microstructure evolution accompanied with texture variation. Lenticular martensite preferentially formed along a dendrite structure with lower Ni concentration after subzero treatment at liquid nitrogen temperature and then reversed into austenite again by the subsequent annealing above 873 K via diffusionless shear mechanism, that is, martensitic reversion took place. Since the martensitic reversion realizes a crystallographic reversibility, the course columnar structure at initial state was reconstructed after the completion of reversion. Furthermore, the course structure formed via martensitic reversion recrystallized to equiaxed fine-grained structure when the annealing temperature became higher, because high density dislocations in martensitic reversed austenite caused by the invariant lattice deformation on two directional martensitic transformations drives the austenite recrystallization. The recrystallization leads to the formation of fine-grained austenitic structure with random orientation, and as a result, Young’s modulus of super invar cast steel was improved to be as high as the forged one without any plastic deformation process.
