The role of primary austenite morphology in cast iron

Abstract: Automotive industry products portfolio includes a wide variety of complex-shaped cast iron products, such as truck engine components. Urged by strict environmental regulations on emissions, these components constantly need to combine higher demands on performance with lighter designs. As a result, cast iron industry continuously faces new challenges related to solidification of new alloys, component designs and casting processes.Complex shapes, variations in the thickness of the casting and the molding material strongly influence the solidification time for a component, thus varying its microstructural coarseness and hence showing different properties depending on the local shape of the casting.This work increases our understanding of the morphological evolution of primary austenite occurring during isothermal coarsening at the semi-solid state. New experimental techniques have been developed to show that primary austenite coarsens according to the Ostwald ripening model in lamellar (LGI), compacted (CGI)and spheroidal (SGI) graphite iron. Significant morphological changes occur after long coarsening times, including dendrite fragmentation and coalescence. The quantitative characterization of the morphological changes during coarsening is accurately described by morphological parameters, i.e., Mγ, DIDHyd and DγNN.Subsequently, the impact of primary austenite morphology on the eutectic microstructures in CGI and SGI has been investigated. It was observed that the eutectic microstructures are not significantly affected by the surface area of primary austenite and the size of the interdendritic regions. Fraction, nodularity, shape distribution of graphite particles and the number of nodules and eutectic cells are similar as a function of coarsening time. These results suggest that the nucleation frequency and growth of eutectic microstructures are not significantly influenced by the morphology of primary austenite.Furthermore, miniaturized tensile tests demonstrated that the UTS in CGI is directly related to the primary austenite morphology. The UTS decreases with the increasing coarseness of primary austenite, showing an inverse linear relation to Mγ, DIDHyd and DγNN. These results demonstrate the strong impact of primary austenite morphology on UTS when the eutectic and eutectoid microstructures are similar, emphasizing the importance of incorporating the morphology of primary austenite in our models.