Saturday 3 January 2015

Explain the formation of microstructures of pearlite, bainite and martensite in steel.

If austenite containing about 0.80 percent carbon is slowly cooled through the critical temperature, ferrite and cementite are rejected simultaneously, forming alternate plates or lamellae. This microstructure is called pearlite. At temperatures just belot the A\, the transformation from austenite.to pearlite may take an appreciable time to initiate and complete, but the product will be lameller pearlite. As the transformation temperature is lowered, the time to initiate transformation
shortens but the product is pearlite of increasing fineness, and at temperatures approaching 550°C it cannot be resolved into its lamellar constituents. Further deerease in transformation temperature causes a lengthening of the ncubation period and a change in structure of the product to a form known as "bainite".
If the temperature is lowered sufficiently, the diffusion controlled nucleation and growth modes of transformation are suppressed completely and the austenite transforms by a diffusionless process in which the crystal lattice effectively shears to a new crystallographic configuration known as "martensite". This phase has a tetragonal crystal structure and contains carbon in supersaturated solid solution.

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