Microstructural Analysis of a Thermomechanically Processed Si-Al TRIP Steel Characterized by EBSD and X-Ray Techniques

The work focuses on the analysis of microstructural features of retained austenite in a thermomechanically processed Si-Al TRIP-type steel microalloyed with Nb and Ti. Austenite amount was determined using XRD and EBSD. Combined methods of LM, SEM and EBSD were applied to reveal the morphology, grain size and distribution of structural constituents. It is possible to retain 14% of  phase enriched in C to about 1.14 wt.%. Retained austenite is uniformly located as blocky grains with a diameter up to 4.5 m in a fine-grained ferritic matrix or between bainitic ferrite laths as thin layers. Special crystallographic relationships between bainitic ferrite and retained austenite were identified on the basis of the analysis of misorientation angles and image quality values.