Dual-phase (DP) steel is the flagship of advanced high-strength steels, which were the first among various candidate alloy systems to find application in weight-reduced automotive components. On the one hand, this is a metallurgical success story: Lean alloying and simple thermomechanical treatment enable use of less material to accomplish more performance while complying with demanding environmental and economic constraints. On the other hand, the enormous literature on DP steels demonstrates the immense complexity of microstructure physics in multiphase alloys: Roughly 50 years after the first reports on ferrite-martensite steels, there are still various open scientific questions. Fortunately, the last decades witnessed enormous advances in the development of enabling experimental and simulation techniques, significantly improving the understanding of DP steels. This review provides a detailed account of these improvements, focusing specifically on (a) microstructure evolution during processing, (b) experimental characterization of micromechanical behavior, and (c) the simulation of mechanical behavior, to highlight the critical unresolved issues and to guide future research efforts.

Abstract. In the scope of the optimization of multi phase steels, e.g. for the automotive industry, control of the microstructure is essential to tailor the mechanical properties. In this study, two cold rolled steels varying in carbon content were annealed and cooled under different laboratory conditions. The microstructure is investigated using optical and electron microscopy and EBSD. The results are correlated to the mechanical properties obtained from tensile, hole expansion and bending test. It is found that tensile strength and elongation are mainly dependent on martensite volume fraction, while yield strength is less affected by chemical composition or annealing treatment. In contrast, hole expansion capacity and maximum bending angle are significantly improved by the homogenization of the microstructure which is independent of strength and elongation. The microstructure homogeneity is expressed by analyzing the Lorenz curves derived from the kernel average misorientation from EBSD measurements.