A sustainable ultra-high strength Fe18Mn3Ti maraging steel through controlled solute segregation and α-Mn nanoprecipitation

The enormous magnitude of 2 billion tons of alloys produced per year demands a change in design philosophy to make materials environmentally, economically, and socially more sustainable. This disqualifies the use of critical elements that are rare or have questionable origin. Amongst the major alloy...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2022-04, Vol.13 (1), p.2330-2330, Article 2330
Main Authors: Kwiatkowski da Silva, A., Souza Filho, I. R., Lu, W., Zilnyk, K. D., Hupalo, M. F., Alves, L. M., Ponge, D., Gault, B., Raabe, D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
147/143
147/28
639/301/1023
639/301/357
Alloy development
Alloys
Fluctuations
High strength
Humanities and Social Sciences
Manganese
Maraging steels
multidisciplinary
Nucleation
Precipitates
Precipitation hardening
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Solid solutions
Steel
Strengthening
Sustainability
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Summary:The enormous magnitude of 2 billion tons of alloys produced per year demands a change in design philosophy to make materials environmentally, economically, and socially more sustainable. This disqualifies the use of critical elements that are rare or have questionable origin. Amongst the major alloy strengthening mechanisms, a high-dispersion of second-phase precipitates with sizes in the nanometre range is particularly effective for achieving ultra-high strength. Here, we propose an alternative segregation-based strategy for sustainable steels, free of critical elements, which are rendered ultrastrong by second-phase nano-precipitation. We increase the Mn-content in a supersaturated, metastable Fe-Mn solid solution to trigger compositional fluctuations and nano-segregation in the bulk. These fluctuations act as precursors for the nucleation of an unexpected α-Mn phase, which impedes dislocation motion, thus enabling precipitation strengthening. Our steel outperforms most common commercial alloys, yet it is free of critical elements, making it a new platform for sustainable alloy design. Recent demands to design alloys in a more sustainable way have discouraged the use of critical elements that are rare. Here the authors demonstrate a segregation-based strategy to produce a sustainable steel, Fe18Mn3Ti, without critical elements while achieving ultrahigh-strength.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-022-30019-x