212 transmission electron microscopy applied to phase transformations in ball bearings

$\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$D transmission electron microscopy has been applied to rolling contact-fatigued ball bearings. The $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$D technique implies that correlations between image features and the object lattice structure are transformed to a stereoscopic effect, using defocused dark-field image pairs. During contact fatigue, the martensite matrix may decay and be transformed to new phases. Particularly, a carbon-enriched phase has been studied. The findings indicate areas of probable nucleation sites and areas being dilated due to internal stresses. The phase is constituted of a lattice structure with minor and regular variations in the g-vector, involving vector orientation and magnitude.