Plastic Flow Instability in 304 Austenitic Stainless Steels at Room Temperature

Abstract A remarkable plastic flow instability is observed during tensile deformation of the commercial 304 stainless-steel sheet at room temperature. It has been found that the occurrence of plastic flow instability in 304 is dependent on the strain rate and specimen gage length. Moreover, it is essentially the same as the necking caused by plastic instability in 316L. However, the enhanced strain hardening resulting from deformation-induced martensitic transformation facilitates the orderly propagation of the strain-localized band. Graphical Abstract