The development of recovery annealed steels

Partially recrystallizing full hard steels might constitute an economic way of producing steels with high strength and fair ductility. The authors have shown that this is not practically feasible under industrial continuous annealing conditions. The only possibility is recovery annealing. Research work in the laboratory, using a simulator of a continuous annealing line, has shown that the ductility of recovery annealed steels can be improved by limiting the degree of cold deformation to some 50-55%, by the addition of boron and by a reduction of the slab reheating temperature.