Low-oxygen rare earth steels.
Journal
Nature materials
ISSN: 1476-4660
Titre abrégé: Nat Mater
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101155473
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
10 2022
10 2022
Historique:
received:
11
05
2018
accepted:
31
07
2022
pubmed:
9
9
2022
medline:
1
10
2022
entrez:
8
9
2022
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Rare earth (RE) addition to steels to produce RE steels has been widely applied when aiming to improve steel properties. However, RE steels have exhibited extremely variable mechanical performances, which has become a bottleneck in the past few decades for their production, utilization and related study. Here in this work, we discovered that the property variation of RE steels stems from the presence of oxygen-based inclusions. We proposed a dual low-oxygen technology, and keeping low levels of oxygen content in steel melts and particularly in the raw RE materials, which have long been ignored, to achieve impressively stable and favourable RE effects. The fatigue life is greatly improved by only parts-per-million-level RE addition, with a 40-fold improvement for the tension-compression fatigue life and a 40% enhancement of the rolling contact fatigue life. We find that RE appears to act by lowering the carbon diffusion rate and by retarding ferrite nucleation at the austenite grain boundaries. Our study reveals that only under very low-oxygen conditions can RE perform a vital role in purifying, modifying and micro-alloying steels, to improve the performance of RE steels.
Identifiants
pubmed: 36075967
doi: 10.1038/s41563-022-01352-9
pii: 10.1038/s41563-022-01352-9
doi:
Substances chimiques
Alloys
0
Steel
12597-69-2
Carbon
7440-44-0
Oxygen
S88TT14065
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
1137-1143Informations de copyright
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
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