Precipitation hardening of high-strength low-alloy steels by nanometer-sized carbides

The effects of Ti, Ti–Mo, and Ti–Nb microalloy additions on the precipitation strengthening in three experimental high-strength low-alloy steels have been investigated. The objective of this work was to study the carbide precipitation under the conditions of continuous cooling and interrupted cooling. It was found that titanium molybdenum complex carbide, (Ti, Mo)C, can strongly maintain nanometer-scaled sizes and has the largest contribution to the hardness as compared to titanium carbide, TiC, and titanium niobium complex carbide, (Ti, Nb)C. The result emphasizes that (Ti, Mo)C particles possess an excellent behavior of thermal stability.