Hardness survey of cold-worked and heat-treated JBK-75 stainless steel alloy

The alloy JBK-75, an age-hardenable austenitic stainless steel, is similar to commercial A-286, but has certain chemistry modifications to improve weldability and hydrogen compatibility. The principal changes are an increase in nickel and a decrease in manganese with lower limits on carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, silicon, and boron. In this study, the effects of solutionizing time and temperature, quench rate, cold working, and the effects of cold working on precipitation kinetics were examined. Findings show that the solutionizing temperature has a moderate effect on the as-quenched hardness, while times greater than that required for solutionizing do not significantly affect hardness. Quench rate was found to have a small effect on as-quenched hardness, however, hardness gradients did not develop in small bars. It was found that JBK-75 can be significantly strengthened by cold working. Cold working alone produced hardness increases from Rockwell-A 49 to R/sub A/ 68. A recovery-related hardness change was noted on heat treating at 300 and 4000C for both as-quenched and as-worked JBK-75. Significant age-hardening was observed at temperatures as low as 5000C for as-worked metal. Aging at 6000C resulted in maximum hardness in the 75 percent worked sample at about 6 hours (R/sub A/ 73.5) while the 50 percent worked sample was near maximum hardness (R/sub A 72.5) after seven days. THE 25 and 0 percent worked samples were considerably underaged after seven days. Similar type kinetic data were obtained for worked and nonworked metal at 650, 700, 800, 850, 900, 1000, and 11000C for times from 10 minutes to 10,000 minutes (6.7 days). The overall purpose of the hardness survey was to better define the effects of cold work on the stress-relieving range, coherent precipitation range, incoherent precipitation range, recrystallization range, solutionizing range, and grain-growth range