The effect of prior austenite grain size on crystallography and variant selection in carbide-free nano-structured bainite

Abstract Prior austenite grain size (PAGS) significantly affects the microstructure and in turn the mechanical properties of nano-structured bainite. In this study, information about crystallographic variants/blocks as well as packets has been extracted using electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) technique for two blocks of nano-baintic steels with different PAGS obtained by austenitization at two different temperatures of 900°C and 1000°C respectively. However, the bainitic fraction has been maintained to be similar by choosing the same isothermal temperature of 250°C for transformation to bainite. The child-parent orientation relationship (OR) was determined to be close to Kurdjumov-Sachs (K-S) using EBSD for larger PAGS specimen while smaller PAGS specimen displayed closeness to K-S OR predominantly and Nishiyama-Wassermann (N-W) OR in some regions. It was observed that a higher PAGS leads to finer bainitic lath thickness, packet size and block width size. Stricter variant selection was found in smaller PAGS sample even though variant pairing was observed between variants of higher misorientation. This hints towards small number of nucleation sites for a grain and space constraint, rather than the tendency for pairing as the reason for selection.