This study investigated the hydrogen permeation property of cementite by fabricating bulk cementite sample using the process combining the mechanical ball milling and subsequent pulse current sintering. The bulk cementite sample having a 96 vol% of cementite was successfully fabricated. The prepared bulk cementite showed no signal of hydrogen permeation during the 3.5 day of electrochemical hydrogen permeation test. The morphology of blister formed in the sample indicated that diffusion coefficient of hydrogen in cementite is very small.

Understanding the deformation mechanism of cementite such as on a slip plane is important with regard to revealing and improving the mechanical property of steels. However, the deformation behavior of cementite has not been well investigated because of the difficulty of sample preparation given the single phase structure of cementite. In this study, by fabricating bulk single phase cementite samples using the method developed by the authors, the deformation texture formed by uniaxial compression was investigated using both electron back scatter diffraction and neutron diffraction. The fabricated sample had a random texture before the compression. After applying a compressive strain of 0.5 at 833 K, (010) fiber texture was formed along the compressive axis. It has been suggested from this trend that the primary slip plane of cementite is (010).