The effect of microstructural banding on failure initiation of HY-100 steel

Microstructural banding of a hot-rolled HY-100 steel plate was accentuated by cooling slowly from the austenite region, which resulted in alternating layers of soft, equiaxed ferrite, and hard “granular ferrite.” The segregation of substitutional alloying elements such as Ni and Cr was identified as the main cause for the microstructural banding. Such banding induces anisotropic flow behavior at large strains, with deformation constrained by “pancake-shaped” bands of the hard granular ferrite. Tensile tests of circumferentially notched HY-100 specimens were performed in order to explore the stress dependence of failure in the slow-cooled as well as the quenched and tempered conditions. The failure behavior of the slow-cooled, microstructurally banded material exhibited a pronounced susceptibility to a void-sheet mode of failure. However, the absence of carbides within the equiaxed ferrite delays void coalescence and material failure to higher strains than in a quenched and tempered microstructure, despite the increased susceptibility to shear localization.