Editorial: Inclusion/Precipitate Engineering and Thermo-Physical Properties in Liquid Steels and Alloys

Abstract

Editorial on the Research TopicInclusion/Precipitate Engineering and Thermo-Physical Properties in Liquid Steels and Alloys Non-metallic inclusion and precipitate behaviors in the liquid-and solid-state steels and alloys play a significant influence on both the cleanliness and the mechanical and corrosion properties of the materials. Two classical terminologies regarding the control of non-metallic inclusion behaviors exist, "Clean Steel Technology" refers to the investigation of inclusion motion, agglomeration, and its removal from the liquid steel and slag (Mu et al., 2018;Park and Zhang, 2020;Michelic and Bernhard, 2022). When the inclusion size is too small (normally sub-micron size) to remove, "Oxide Metallurgy" provides a suitable solution to utilize these types of specific inclusions/precipitates to refine the prior austenite grain size (PAGS) and induce intragranular acicular ferrite (IAF) formation to improve the steel mechanical property, e.g., low-temperature toughness (Sarma et al., 2009;Mu et al., 2017). Recently, with the development of simulation and characterization methodologies, the boundary of these two concepts starts to overlap, and it is better to use one concept, i.e., "Inclusion/ Precipitate Engineering" to describe the correlation of processing, structure, and property regarding the particle behaviors. Very recently, this concept has been applied not only in steels but also in e.g., Ni/Co-based super-alloys (Yang et al., 2021), high entropy alloys, etc. (Wang et al., 2021). Besides the behaviors of inclusions in the steelmaking and casting process, control of inclusions in the state-ofthe-art processes, e.g., additive manufacturing (AM) (Eo et al., 2022) is also included in this concept. Last but not least, machine learning (ML) based methods, as well as automatic analysis (Tang et al., 2017), start to be applied in this field extensively to classify different inclusion types and analyze the statistical features rapidly. The schematic illustration of the "Inclusion/Precipitate Engineering" concept is presented in Figure 1.The Research Topic Inclusion/precipitate engineering and its thermo-physical property in liquid steels and alloys aims at collecting the state-of-the-art research activities focusing on the experimental and theoretical studies of inclusions and precipitates behaviors, seven peer-reviewed original research articles are collected, covering the topics of inclusion agglomeration in the liquid steels, oxide metallurgy, precipitation in TRIP steel, inclusion classification by machine learning (ML), the thermal conductivity of silicate glasses and melts, precipitation behavior of Fe 2 O 3 , etc.Ferreira et al. investigated the liquid inclusion collision and agglomeration in Ca-treated Al-killed steel, the lab-scale experiments found that the liquid calcium aluminates have a tendency to agglomerate and grow. They also reported that the growth is fast immediately following calcium treatment, and subsequently slows down, which may not be found easily in the industrial scale analys...

Effect of Manufacturing Conditions and Al Addition on Inclusion Characteristics in Co-Based Dual-Phase High Entropy Alloy

“…Besides, the influence of small amount of Al addition associated with different manufacturing conditions on the inclusion characteristics will be investigated. This work aims to contribute to the application of 'Inclusion/Precipitate Engineering' concept [24] in advanced HEAs.…”