Yielding Behavior and Strain Aging Properties of Bake Hardening Steel with Dual-Phase Microstructure

This study deals with the yielding behavior and strain aging properties of three bake hardening steels with dual-phase microstructure, fabricated by varying the annealing temperature. Bake hardening and aging tests are performed to examine the correlation of martensite volume fraction with yielding behavior and strain aging properties of the bake hardening steels with dual-phase microstructure. The volume fraction of martensite increases with increasing annealing temperature. Room-temperature tensile test results show that the yielding behavior changes from discontinuous-type to continuous-type with increasing volume fraction of martensite due to higher mobile dislocation density. According to the bake hardening and aging tests, the specimen with the highest fraction of martensite exhibited high bake hardening with low aging index because solute carbon atoms in ferrite and martensite effectively diffuse to dislocations during the bake hardening test, while in the aging test they diffuse at only ferrite due to lower aging temperature.