A Study on the Ageing Behavior of Cu-bearing HSLA steels by thermal analysis

열분석법에 의한 Cu를 함유한 HSLA강의 시효 거동에 관한 연구

The ageing behavior of Cu-bearing HSLA steels was studied by using Differential scanning calorimetry(DSC), Transmission electron microscopy and hardness tester. Two heat evolution peaks were observed during DSC scans over the temperature range of 25～590$^{\circ}C$ at a heating rate of 5$^{\circ}C$/min. The peaks appeared in low (241∼319$^{\circ}C$ : HSLA-A, 224∼310$^{\circ}C$ : HSLA-B) and high temperature (514∼590$^{\circ}C$ : HSLA-A, 451∼558$^{\circ}C$ : HSLA-B) are attributed to the formation of coherent Cu-clusters and noncoherent $\varepsilon$-Cu phase, respectively. It was confirmed that as ageing proceeds, the coherent bcc Cu-clusters transform to noncoherent fcc $\varepsilon$-Cu phase. In the case of the ageing to peak hardness at 300$^{\circ}C$ and 400$^{\circ}C$, the coherent Cu-clusters contributed to the hardening. As ageing time and temperature increase over peak hardness, noncoherent $\varepsilon$-Cu are formed and hardness decreases.