Materials Science Forum, Vol.473-474, 177-181, 2005
Study of the isothermal phase transformations in duplex stainless steels by EBSD method
Duplex stainless steels constitute a famous group of the family of stainless steels. They are named by their typical dual microtexture which consists of austenite and ferrite, where both phases are present in significant quantities. This microtexture is resulted by a large number of alloying elements with low content of carbon. Because of those many components, there are a lot of typical phase transformations during different heat treatments. Electron Back Scatter Diffraction (EBSD) is a microtexture method for obtaining electron diffraction data from bulk samples in the scanning electron microscope (SEM) which allows more accurate measurements of the microtexture than conventional imaging methods (e.g. grain size, shape, orientation and boundary misorientations). Thus EBSD gives a new dimension to study the phase transformations of duplex stainless steels. Clearing up the influence of grain orientations and boundaries can lead us to the development of materials in which phase transformations can be controlled much easier. During the experiments bulk samples of SAF-2704 superduplex stainless steel were isothermally heat treated and the phases formed as well as their coherence were studied by EBSD and EDS methods.