A comparative analysis of austenite-to-martensite and austenite-to-bainite phase transformation kinetics in steels

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison of the macroscopic transformation strain evolution as a function of the bainite and martensite phase fractions in steels. Specifically, the evolution of anisotropic strain with phase fraction follows a linear trend for the martensitic transformation due to continuous stress-induced variant selection. In the case of bainitic transformation, the anisotropic strain evolves non-linearly owing to diffusion, minimizing the distortion around the bainitic sheaves and further promoting stress-induced variant selection at the early stages of the bainitic phase transformation. However, this effectiveness is reduced when the bainitic sheaves start constricting the growth of each other.