Microstructure evolution and property of austenitic stainless steel after ECAP

Ultrafine-grain or even nano-grain microstructure can be made by equal channel angular pressing (ECAP), mainly resulting from shear strain. The authors experimentally investigated 00Cr18Ni12 austenitic stainless steel and its mechanical properties during and after ECAP. The results showed that because of larger shear stress, many slipping bands occured inside grains, with the increase of pressing pass, the slipping bands may interact with each other to separate slipping bands into sub-grains, finally, the sub-grains transformed into new grains with large angular boundaries. The grain size was about 200nm after the 7th pass. After the 1st and 2nd pass, the tensile strength was higher 93% and 144% than that without ECAP, the yield strength was 5.3 and 6.6 times of that without ECAP respectively.