An ideal ultrafine-grained (UFG) microstructure for high strength and high ductility should have short dislocation-slip path to impede dislocation slip and very low dislocation density to ensure more room for dislocation accumulation. Such a microstructure is hard to produce, especially for UFG metals produced by severe plastic deformation techniques. Here, we report an ideal UFG structure produced by reverse transformation of deformation-induced martensite in 304 L austenitic stainless steel. It produced small grains and a high density of nanotwins for both high strength and high ductility. This approach is applicable to face-centered cubic metals with low stacking fault energy.

Strength and toughness are a couple of paradox as similar as strength-ductility trade-off in homogenous materials, body-centered-cubic steels in particular. Here we report a simple way to get ultrahigh toughness without sacrificing strength. By simple alloying design and hot rolling the 5Mn3Al steels in ferrite/austenite dual phase temperature region, we obtain a series of ferrite/martensite laminated steels that show up-to 400–450J Charpy V-notch impact energy combined with a tensile strength as high as 1.0–1.2 GPa at room temperature, which is nearly 3–5 times higher than that of conventional low alloy steels at similar strength level. This remarkably enhanced toughness is mainly attributed to the delamination between ferrite and martensite lamellae. The current finding gives us a promising way to produce high strength steel with ultrahigh impact toughness by simple alloying design and hot rolling in industry.

A novel type of austenite–martensite dual-phase laminate steel with a yield strength of 2.2 GPa, ultimate tensile strength of 2.5 GPa, uniform elongation of 9.4% and total elongation of 12% was produced. Such unexpectable mechanical properties were mainly due to the synergistic strengthening of nanolaminate microstructure, high densities of dislocations and nanoprecipitates. The high uniform elongation at very high stress could be attributed to the strongly enhanced work hardening rate, mainly enabled by transformation-induced plasticity (TRIP) of the austenite reverted by annealing, as well as the cooperative deformation and stress/strain partitioning between the austenite–martensite stacked nanolaminate. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT IMPACT STATEMENT This work verifies an effective strategy of combining TRIP and maraging to achieve both ultrahigh strength and high ductility of steel.

Superplastic materials are capable of exhibiting large tensile elongation at elevated temperature, which is of great industrial significance because it forms the basis of a fabrication method to produce complex shapes. Superplasticity with elongation larger than 500% has been widely realized in many metals and alloys, but seldomly been succeeded in low carbon low alloy steel, even though it is commercially applied in the largest quantity. Here we report ultrahigh superplastic elongation of 900–1200% in the FeMnAl low carbon steels at high strain rate of 10⁻²–10⁻³ s⁻¹. Such high-strain-rate superplasticity was attributed to dynamic austenite reverse phase transformation from a heavily cold rolled ferrite to fine-grained ferrite/austenite duplex microstructure and subsequent limited dynamic grain coarsening, under which a large fraction of high angle boundaries can be resulted for superplastic deformation. It is believed that this finding of the low carbon low alloy steel with ultrahigh superplasticity and relative low cost would remarkably promote the application of superplastic forming technique in automobile, aeronautical, astronautical and other fields.

The effect of the grain refinement and texture on tensile and fatigue properties in commercially pure titanium (grade 2) processed by rotary swaging (RS) and an annealing treatment is investigated. The as-processed sample consists of band-like grains on the longitudinal section and equiaxed grains on the transversal section and revealed an obvious fiber texture with respect to the rod axis. Through this technique, a sample with a high tensile strength of 870 MPa, a high uniform elongation of 8.5%, and a high fatigue limit of 490 MPa can be achieved, and the tensile and fatigue properties are almost the same as those of a conventional Ti-6Al-4V alloy. The enhanced mechanical properties and plastic deformation mechanism are discussed in terms of the observed ultrafine-grained microstructure and strong fiber texture.