Formation of ultra fine grained structure during annealing of heavily drawn metastable austenitic steel wire

It is well known that the ultra grain refinement can be achieved by sever cold rolling, followed by reversion treatment in metastable austenitic stainless steel plate. In this study, the cold rolling was replaced by cold drawing. This procedure was applied to a metastable austenitic steel (Fe-16Cr-IONi alloy) thin wire, and then the microstructure development during cold drawing and annealing was investigated. The austenite phase transformed to martensite during the drawing. Vickers hardness of the wire markedly increased with increasing the drawing strain. When the drawing strain reached about 4.5, the wire exhibited martensite single structure and had high hardness of Hv4.4GPa. Annealing of the heavily drawn wire at around 900K for 0.6ks leads to the fort-nation of reversed austenite with the diffusional reversion mechanism. As a result, ultra fine-gained austenitic single structure with the grain size of about 0.6 mu m was obtained. It was also found that the wire has an excellent combination of a strength and ductility.