Deformation law and bonding mechanism of 45 carbon steel/316L stainless steel cladding tubes fabricated by three-roll skew rolling bonding process

Realizing the continuous forming and metallurgical bonding in bimetallic cladding tubes with high-strength and corrosion-resistance is the key bottleneck to be solved urgently. In this study, 45 carbon steel/316L stainless steel (CS/SS) cladding tubes were fabricated by the three-roll skew rolling bonding process under different radial reduction rates. The deformation law, interfacial microstructure characteristics, and deformation mechanism were analyzed. With the increase of the radial reduction rates from 11.7 % to 19.3 %, the 45 CS/316L SS cladding tubes were elongated along with the diameter and wall thickness decrease. Besides, the wall thickness ratio between 45 CS and 316L SS was unchanged due to the coordinated deformation. Tensile shear fracture locations of CS/SS cladding tubes were on the 45 CS matrix, and the average diffusion distances in the longitudinal section and the cross section were consistent, proving that uniform metallurgical bonding was achieved. Besides, average decarburized layer thickness decreased and average diffusion distances increased with the increase of radial reduction rates. Furthermore, spherical and fibrous Mn-Si-Cr-O oxides, generated in the insulation heating process, were dispersed near the bonding interface. The refined grains were formed close to the interface, and deformation twins were formed away from the interface on the 316L SS side, whereas only elongated ferrite grains evolved due to the decarburization adjacent to the interface on the 45 CS side. Therefore, the interfacial bonding mechanism was illustrated as three stages, namely the insulation heating stage, the skew rolling bonding stage, and the air cooling stage. The three-roll skew rolling bonding process provides a high-efficiency method to prepare CS/SS cladding tubes with uniform metallurgical bonding, which adopts axial forming and contributes to breaking through the product length size limit.