Microstructure of Steels and Cast Irons

Madeleine Durand-Charre gained her Docteur-ès-Sciences degree at the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble, where she spent the remainder of her career as a teacher and research worker in the field of structural metallurgy. Her special interests concern the fundamental aspects of phase equilibria and their relationship to the microstructure of complex commercial alloys. Due to her combined teaching and research activities, one of her permanent preoccupations is to explain the mechanisms involved in the formation of microstructures and to illustrate them with the aid of examples either from simple systems or from more complex industrial materials. The present book concerning the microstructures of iron-base alloys is abundantly illustrated with explicit macro- and micrographs, emanating both from her own laboratory and from her numerous academic and industrial contacts. Madeleine Durand-Charre has previously published a similar monograph concerning the microstructure of superalloys.

• First Part The history of iron and steel — of swords and ploughshares.- 1 From iron to steel.- 2 Of swords and swordmaking.- 2 The Genesis of Microstructures.- 3 The principal phases in steels.- 4 The basic phase diagrams.- 5 The formation of solidification structures.- 6 Liquid/solid structural transformations.- 7 Grains, grain boundaries and interfaces.- 8 Diffusion.- 9 The decomposition of austenite.- 10 The pearlite transformation.- 11 The martensite transformation.- 12 The bainite transformation.- 13 Precipitation.- 3 Steels and cast irons.- 14 Steel Design.- 15 Solidification macrostructures.- 16 Macro- and microstructures of sintered powder products.- 17 Plain carbon and low alloy steels.- 18 Quench hardening steels.- 19 Stainless steels.- 20 Heat resisting steels and iron-containing superalloys.- 21 Cast irons.- 22 Appendices.- 23 References.- 24 Index.