Development of Austempered Ductile Iron for High Tensile and Fracture toughness by Two Step Austempering Process.

During conventional austempering austempered ductile iron showed a decrease in fracture toughness with increasing austempering temperature, while the tensile toughness increased. Thus high fracture toughness was associated with low tensile toughness. A two step austempering treatment was then adopted where the samples were first au stem p ered at 3000e for sh ort peri 0 ds varyi ng from 10m in utes to 60 minutes, and then subsequently transferred to a second furnace at 4000e for further austempering for 2 hours. It was found that this resulted in fine ferrite grain size, high carbon content of the retained austenite together with increased stability of the austenite. Under such conditions it was possible to achieve an excellent combination of high fracture toughness and high tensile toughness.