Dilatometric analysis of austenite formation during intercritical annealing

Dilatometry is a useful method to investigate the transformation kinetics of ferrous alloys. In the present study, a dilatometric analysis procedure that considers the effect of non-isotropic volume change was applied to evaluate the kinetics of austenite formation during the intercritical annealing of TRIP steels. Metallographic analysis was conducted to validate the dilatometric analysis results. The austenite fractions from the dilatometric analysis showed reasonable agreement with those from the metallographic one. This verifies that the kinetics of austenite formation during heat treatment of low carbon TRIP steel can be reliably analyzed with the proposed procedure.