DEVELOPMENT OF HARDNESS IN A Fe- BASED NANO-COMPOSITE ALLOY

Achieving extreme hardness in the newly synthetic steel formed by converting from initial amorphous state to subse-quent crystalline structure –named as devitrification process- was studied in this research work. Results of TEM observa-tions and XRD tests showed that crystallized microstructure were made up four different nano-scale phases i.e., ?-Fe, Fe36Cr12Mo10, Fe3C and Fe3B. More, Vickers hardness testing revealed a maximum hardness of 18.6 GPa which is signifi-cantly harder than existing hardmetals. Detailed kinetic and structural studies have been proof that two key factors were contributed to achieve this extreme hardness; supersaturation of transition metal alloying elements (especially Nb) and also reduction in the structure to the nano-size crystals.