Development of Hot Rolled Ship Plate with High Strength and High Toughness

A new hot-rolled ship plate with high strength and high toughness is successfully developed through chemical composition design and TMCP process. Experimental methods, such as OM, TEM and X-EDS, were used to study the microstructure and precipitates of steel. The primary microstructural constituent is acicular ferrite, quasi-polygonal ferrite with second constituents along grain boundaries. Lath width of acicular ferrite is about 1μm. Cubic particles about several hundreds nanometers and nanometer particles exist in experimental steel. It can be concluded that acicular ferrite is the main reason for high strength and super toughness. precipitation hardening due to dispersed precipitations of carbonitrides can not be overlooked.