Fabrication of grain-oriented silicon steel by a novel way: Strip casting process

A 0.23 mm-thick grain-oriented silicon steel sheet was successfully produced by a new process including strip casting, hot rolling, normalizing, two-stage cold rolling with an intermediate annealing, primary annealing and secondary recrystallization annealing. Microstructure, texture and inhibitor evolutions were briefly investigated. It was shown that Goss texture was absent in the hot rolled strip. After normalizing, a number of finely dispersed MnS precipitates with a diameter of 20-80 nm were formed. The primary annealed strip exhibited fully recrystallized microstructure with the average grain size of 13 mu m, together with weak alpha-fiber and relatively strong and uniform gamma-fiber texture. However, the Goss texture was not observed, which was significantly different from previous results that the Goss texture was the most populous component in the primary recrystallization texture of two-stage route. After secondary recrystallization annealing, very large grains with a grain size of 6-40 mm were formed and the magnetic induction B-8 was as high as 1.84 T. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.