Ultrastrong low-carbon nanosteel produced by heterostructure and interstitial mediated warm rolling

Bo Gao; Qingquan Lai; Yang Cao; Rong Hu; Lirong Xiao; Zhiyi Pan; Ningning Liang; Yusheng Li; Gang Sha; Manping Liu; Hao Zhou; Xiaolei Wu; Yuntian Zhu

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba8169

Ultrastrong low-carbon nanosteel produced by heterostructure and interstitial mediated warm rolling

Sci Adv. 2020 Sep 23;6(39):eaba8169. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba8169. Print 2020 Sep.

Authors

Bo Gao¹, Qingquan Lai², Yang Cao¹, Rong Hu², Lirong Xiao¹, Zhiyi Pan¹, Ningning Liang¹, Yusheng Li¹, Gang Sha², Manping Liu³, Hao Zhou⁴, Xiaolei Wu^{5

6}, Yuntian Zhu^{4

7}

Affiliations

¹ Nano and Heterogeneous Materials Center, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China.
² Herbert Gleiter Institute of Nanoscience, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China.
³ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.
⁴ Nano and Heterogeneous Materials Center, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China. hzhou511@njust.edu.cn xlwu@imech.ac.cn ytzhu@ncsu.edu.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. hzhou511@njust.edu.cn xlwu@imech.ac.cn ytzhu@ncsu.edu.
⁶ School of Engineering Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
⁷ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA.

Abstract

Ultrastrong materials can notably help with improving the energy efficiency of transportation vehicles by reducing their weight. Grain refinement by severe plastic deformation is, so far, the most effective approach to produce bulk strong nanostructured metals, but its scaling up for industrial production has been a challenge. Here, we report an ultrastrong (2.15 GPa) low-carbon nanosteel processed by heterostructure and interstitial mediated warm rolling. The nanosteel consists of thin (~17.8 nm) lamellae, which was enabled by two unreported mechanisms: (i) improving deformation compatibility of dual-phase heterostructure by adjusting warm rolling temperature and (ii) segregating carbon atoms to lamellar boundaries to stabilize the nanolamellae. Defying our intuition, warm rolling produced finer lamellae than cold rolling, which demonstrates the potential and importance of tuning deformation compatibility of interstitial containing heterostructure for nanocrystallization. This previously unreported approach is applicable to most low-carbon, low-alloy steels for producing ultrahigh strength materials in industrial scale.

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