From High-Manganese Steels to Advanced High-Entropy Alloys

Arguably, steels are the most important structural material, even to this day. Numerous design concepts have been developed to create and/or tailor new steels suited to the most varied applications. High-manganese steels (HMnS) stand out for their excellent mechanical properties and their capacity to make use of a variety of physical mechanisms to tailor their microstructure, and thus their properties. With this in mind, in this contribution, we explore the possibility of extending the alloy design concepts that haven been used successfully in HMnS to the recently introduced high-entropy alloys (HEA). To this aim, one HMnS steel and the classical HEA Cantor alloy were subjected to cold rolling and heat treatment. The evolution of the microstructure and texture during the processing of the alloys and the resulting properties were characterized and studied. Based on these results, the physical mechanisms active in the investigated HMnS and HEA were identified and discussed. The results evidenced a substantial transferability of the design concepts and more importantly, they hint at a larger potential for microstructure and property tailoring in the HEA.