The Al–Fe–Mn system revisited—An updated thermodynamic description using the most recent binaries

Abstract

The so-called TWinning Induced Plasticity (TWIP) steels have gained a lot of attention in the last couple of years due to their excellent mechanical properties; they show very high strength and are at the same time very ductile. The TWIP steels are austenitic and form mechanical twins under deformation. All TWIP steels have very high manganese content and a certain sub-group of these steels, lightweight steels with induced plasticity (so-called L-IP), also have high aluminum content. These steels are the lightweight versions of the TWIP steels and are therefore of high interest to the automotive industry. However, the grades existing today have too low yield strength. The yield strength can be improved by alloying and/or by precipitation hardening. Both these techniques require detailed insight on the thermodynamic properties of the alloy system in question. In this work, a thermodynamic reassessment of the entire Al–Fe–Mn system has been performed as a first step to describe the Fe–Al–C–Mn system, the core system for L-IP steels. All available experimental information has been taken into consideration and a set of data has been selected to be used in the optimization. The new thermodynamic description is based on the most recent thermodynamic descriptions of the constituent binaries and reproduces the experimental information in a satisfactory manner. This description, as opposed to previous descriptions has been optimized to fit experimental results in both the aluminum-rich part and the iron-manganese rich part of the system.