Peculiarity of structure and crystallography of plastic deformation of lath martensite in structural steels

The structure of a martensite packet and cold plastic deformation within on e packet, as occurring in the quenched of pseudosingle crystals of 15CrNi4 and 37CrNi3 structural steels, was studied by X-ray diffraction, scanning e lectron microscopy, and optical microscopy. By electron microscopic analysi s it is shown that there are six variants of martensite crystals throughout the packet, in agreement with previous X-ray crystallographic results on t he number of martensitic variants in a packet. The slip planes in pseudosin gle crystals were found to be close to {112}(M) and {110}(M), which are typ ical of the bcc lattice. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved .