Determination of the optimal temperature regime of plastic deformation of micro alloyed automobile wheel steels

It has been established that hot plastic deformation microalloyed steel 10HFTBch type accelerates the excretion of pearlite and causes structure refinement during subsequent cooling due to an increase of start of new phases’ centers. This leads to the formation of a fine-grained dispersed two-phase structure consisting of ferrite with a high dislocation density and pearlite. It has been determined that at the optimum deformation temperature the prevailing mechanism of structure refinement is the fragmentation of austenitic and ferrite grains of a common initial orientation into misoriented subgrains (fragments) with low-angle dislocation boundaries of deformation origin. A thorough thermokinetic analysis of the course of this process made it possible to determine the optimal temperature regime for plastic deformation for this type of steel, which is 850-900 °C. Plastic deformation increases the range of of pearlite’s transformation existence rates by 2.5 times, it was found that after 30% deformation at 950 °C, pearlite transformation begins at a cooling rate of 5 °C/s, and without deformation–at 2 °C/s.