Flakes are special discontinuities in steel parts that have the form of silver-colored spots on fracture surfaces or thin hair-like cracks on a ground and etched template. They appear and grow after a considerable incubation period, often in the operation of the part, which makes them a dangerous defect. Depending on the dimensions, number, and position in the metal, flakes can decrease the toughness and ductility of steel to zero and reduce markedly the service life of steel parts and structures, causing unexpected and serious failures. The present review briefly generalizes recent works devoted to the formation of flakes in steel.Metallurgists encountered flakes as early as in the first world war in mechanical treatment of large preforms for gun barrels. Thousands of research papers and several monographs [1 -5 and other works] have been published by Russian specialists since that time but the problem has not ceased to be important. For a long time metallurgists could determine neither the mechanism nor the causes of the formation of flakes. Lengthy and intense discussions of the causes of their formation have shown that this phenomenon should be associated with the effect of hydrogen and internal stresses.
States of hydrogen in steel.It has been established that hydrogen in steel can be present in various states, namely, atomic-protonic hydrogen dissolved in the crystal lattice ("free," diffusion mobile), atomic hydrogen bound to defects of the crystal structure (dislocations, vacancies, intergrain and interphase boundaries), molecular hydrogen bound with micro-and macrovoids, hydrogen bound chemically to hydrideforming metals (Ti, Nb, V, Zr, rare-earth metals), hydrogen bound chemically to nonmetals (C, O, S, N), for example in an oxidized state in the form of water vapor adsorbed in pores and hydroxyl groups incorporated in nonmetallic inclusions. There are data that hydrogen forms compounds of the solidsolution type with some alloying elements in steels and can be dissolved'in the carbide phase, i.e., can have the form of hydrocarbides [ 1, 2, 5 -7].It is assumed that the process of formation of flakes is caused only by the portion of hydrogen that can move over the volume of the metal, i.e., is in an atomic-protonic state. However, at present there are no reliable methods of fractional separation of different forms of hydrogen [ 1 ].The authors of [8,9] studied the forms of existence of hydrogen in metals of the Fe group by the method of degassing specimens in heating. The hydrogen content in the specimens Prometei Research Institute of Machine Materials, Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia. and the distribution over its various forms were determined by integrating the corresponding curves describing the dependence of the rate of emission of H 2 on the temperature. The specimens had various initial states (cast, forged, hydroextruded) and the corresponding amounts of structural defects. The thermokinetic heating curves of all the metals had two well-defined groups of peaks corresponding to tow-temperature (at 100-650...