Nanostructured steel plates.

[Collimatrix]

If you would like to learn more about steel microstructures and phase changes, you should find an an actual textbook that wasn't written by someone who was strung out on heroin, unlike this one.

 

Quote

Take a perfect male (like me) to symbolize a perfect single phase like hard cementite close to nirvana (and therefore single-crystalline). Take a bunch of male students to embody a less perfect polycrystalline phase of cementite, and a bunch of female students as (yielding and soft) ferrite. What you find in an old-fashioned class room (boys on the left, girls on the right) then would be pearlite. Not a real clean phase but a well-defined mix of two real phases. Martensite would correspond to teenagers, neither here nor there, just a transitory phase on the way to adulthood. Austenite corresponds to kids; capable to change into adults of either sex. Bainite then could be represented by people in a zoo. You get a mix of everything from above including, maybe, some apes (hard to tell from humans without a good microscope).

 

[Lord_James]

On 7/31/2020 at 4:32 AM, Collimatrix said:

If you would like to learn more about steel microstructures and phase changes, you should find an an actual textbook

Do you have any recommendations or authors? 

[Collimatrix]

11 hours ago, Lord_James said:

Do you have any recommendations or authors? 

I've been having a good time with the Knife Steel Nerds blog.  It's a good balance of accessible and technical for me.  The author just wrote a book, which I have purchased but not read.

 

Obviously, it's aimed at knifemakers, but it goes enough into the basic theory of steel that it works for general metallurgy.

[Toxn]

12 hours ago, Lord_James said:

Do you have any recommendations or authors? 

https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/iss/index.html

 

This is basically a matsci 101 and 201 course given by a German who likes beer. It's very good.

[Collimatrix]

I found a very good lecture on this subject:

 

 

[gaucho1]

Very clear and pertinent. Thank You

[Collimatrix]

Nanostructured bainite's day in the sun as armor may have come to an end:
 

 

This is the same guy who worked on the nanostructured bainite.  Apparently Tata steel has come out with the next big advance.

 

The claims made in this video are remarkable.  This steel is 550 Vickers hardness, which is about 500 Brinell.  That's definitely high hardness armor by most definitions.  However, the toughness is just as good as a rolled homogeneous armor like Armox 370, and it's weldable!

 

On top of that, the steel is supposed to be reasonably inexpensive, and readily mass-producible using mostly existing tooling.