Hot Deformation Behavior of an Fe-Al Steel in the Two Phase Region

The Thin Slab Cast Direct Rolling (TSCDR) process offers several economic and environmental advantages. The elimination of slab reheating and roughing deformation, however, leave fewer opportunities for grain refinement and some large grains persist in the micro structure. To solve this problem, we employed the chemistry which leads to a two-phase mixture of ferrite and austenite over a wide temperature range. This chemistry has two advantages. The first is that the two-phase mixture is highly resistant to grain coarsening leading to a small initial grain size. Secondly, hot-rolling of the two-phase mixture leads to recrystallization nucleation in the vicinity of the second phase particles and further grain refinement. Results are presented on the hot-rolling of an Fe-Al steel with a mixed ferrite-austenite microstructure at high temperatures.