Project Objective: The major objectives of this program were to investigate the bake hardening (BH) mechanism in ultra-low carbon (ULC) steels and use the better understanding of this mechanism to design and process a new generation of bake hardening steels for automotive applications. These new steels will be thoroughly characterized in terms of their microstructure, formability, BH response, and tensile properties.
Background:Current bake hardening ULC steels offer bake hardening increments (BHI) in the range of 35 MPa (5 ksi). These current BH ULC steels are limited by the level of understanding of the strengthening mechanisms operative in these steels. It has been proposed that higher levels of BHI await a better understanding and application of these mechanisms. The purpose of this program is to develop an ULC steel that can provide a consistent BH increment of 100 MPa, while retaining good formability. This is important for improving product quality and consistency as well as saving resources and energy, since a higher degree of consistency means fewer rejects, less scrap and less remelting, and fewer failures during the fabrication process. Since only one year of research was funded by the sponsor, this Final Technical Report represents the progress made during the first year of the project.
METHOD OF APPROACH:The experimental work can be divided into four phases, as summarized in Table 1. In each phase, the materials were received or designed, processed and tested, to evaluate the BH increment or response, as a function of compositions and processing conditions. Microstructural characterization by various techniques was performed in order to gain insights into the mechanisms of flow stress increment by bake hardening. Efforts are made to clarify the following features:1) the overall nature of the matrix, such as polygonal or acicular ferrite, and grain size, 2) the density, distribution, configuration and overall mobility of dislocations, 3) the amount of C and other alloying elements in solid solution, 4) grain boundary characteristics, such as grain boundary misorientations and distribution, 5) hardness across grain boundaries (nano-scale), and 6) distribution of C around dislocations and grain boundaries (atomic scale). Modeling of the dent resistance using current steel properties would be performed and reported by ORNL. The purpose here was to study the BHI of the commercial BH steel in the batch annealed condition. Very small amounts of carbon were expected to be in solid solution in this condition. There were two goals of this phase. First, to measure the magnitude of BHI in this commercial steel, and, second to begin to examine the role of solute carbon in contributing to the BHI. The steel used in this phase is shown in Table 2. The as-received commercial bake hardenable low carbon steel (with Temper Rolling of ~ 1%) were pre-strained to 2% and 5% and then subjected to the BH treatments as follows:0% strain -180°C/ 20 minutes -ACRT. 0% strain -180°C/ 30 minutes -ACRT. 0% strain -180°C/ 60 minute...