Peculiarity of structure and crystallography of plastic deformation of lath martensite in structural steels

The structure of a martensite packet and cold plastic deformation within one packet, as occurring in the quenched of pseudosingle crystals of 15CrNi4 and 37CrNi3 structural steels, was studied by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and optical microscopy. By electron microscopic analysis it is shown that there are six variants of martensite crystals throughout the packet, in agreement with previous X-ray crystallographic results on the number of martensitic variants in a packet. The slip planes in pseudosingle crystals were found to be close to {112}M and {110}M, which are typical of the bcc lattice.