Effect of low nitrogen content on work hardening and microstructural evolution in Hadfield steel

Nitrogen content in austenitic manganese steels is usually not reported nor standardized. The present work has found that it typically ranges between 130 ppm and 200 ppm in solution. Microstructural evolution has been studied by optical microscopy, using mainly differential interference contrast mode. Work hardening was analyzed under compression conditions using Hollomon's fitting and Vickers microindentation hardness measurements at different deformation levels. Even low contents of nitrogen in solution exhibit a significant effect on the slope of stress–strain curves, with strain-hardening exponent values of 0.7, 0.57 and 0.41 for 720 ppm, 130 ppm and 71 ppm of nitrogen, respectively. It was also found that the nitrogen content influences the microstructure of deformed coarse grained polycrystalline austenite, leading to twining and shear bands at the upper level of nitrogen, while it was not clearly found in the samples with lower nitrogen content.