The effect of Nb on texture evolutions of the ultrafine-grained dual-phase steels fabricated by cold rolling and intercritical annealing

Dual phase (DP) steels with different amounts of Nb were produced by utilizing cold rolling and inter critical annealing of a ferrite-martensite duplex starting structure. The effects of Nb contents (0.00, 0.06, 0.12 and 0.18 wt%) on microstructure and texture evolutions were studied. Addition of Nb promoted formation of ultra-fine grained structures with the ferrite grain size of about similar to 1 mu m and uniformly dispersed martensite particles. The results showed increasing the fraction of the high angle grain boundaries and formation of {111} fiber components in the microstructures with increasing Nb content. In addition, the texture power was decreased with the addition of Nb, resulting in random texture components. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.