EBSD study of purity effects during hot working in austenitic stainless steels

The technique of electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) is considered as a powerful instrument for the study of the microstructural changes during hot forming processes and gives the possibility to present the information in different ways (OIM, misorientation diagram and pole figures). The present work is focused on the observation by EBSD of the microstructure evolution during deformation at high temperature of three austenitic stainless steels: AISI-304H, AISI-304L and a high purity steel HP. The difference between the three steels is the content carbon and the presence of residual elements. To this aim compression tests were carried out at a constant strain rate of 0.001 s−1 and different temperatures. The study showed an increase of twin boundary fractions and a diminution of substructure (low angle densities boundaries) at increasing temperatures. On the other hand, increasing carbon content promotes lower twin boundary fractions and larger amounts of low angle boundaries. This effect can be explained by the reduction of grain boundary mobility caused by increasing carbon contents, which in turn reduces the migration rate and consequently the probability of twin boundary generation. Moreover, the increment of low angle boundaries with carbon content accelerates the twin character loss. It was also found that the dynamically recrystallized grain size decreased at increasing carbon content due to a typical drag effect. No important features on textures were found during DDRX.