Constitution Of Iron-Chromium-Manganese Alloys

DESPITE the increasing interest in and the technical importance of iron-chromium-manganese alloys, very little published information is available regarding their constitution. F. M. Becket's paper1 in 1930 represents the first correlated effort in the field of these alloys. The paper served particularly to draw attention to the commercial possibilities of iron-rich alloys containing chromium and manganese in balanced proportions. The duplex structure of alloys within the commercial range was briefly discussed, but exposition of their structural constitution was necessarily limited because the physical properties and corrosion resistance of the alloys were the main subjects of the paper. Both prior to and following the publication of F. M. Becket's paper, and at his instigation, an extensive investigation of the constitution of iron-chromium-manganese alloys of commercial purity was in progress at the Union Carbide and Carbon Research Laboratories, Inc. The present paper is based on the results of that investigation. In the last few years, investigations covering various portions of this alloy system have also been made in Europe. W. Koester briefly mentioned the effect of annealing on chromium-manganese steel2 and later3 constructed approximate sections of the iron-chromium-manganese equilibrium diagram. M. Schmidt and H. Legat14 even more recently studied this system, and their article and conclusions are of interest as representing an entirely independent study of a number of iron-chromium-manganese alloys. Koester's sections are shown in Fig. 1. The figures summarize the effect of manganese additions to iron alloys containing 5, 10, 15 and 20 per cent Cr as well as the effect of increasing chromium content on iron alloys containing 3, 8, 20 and 30 per cent Mn. These diagrams, within their composition limits, substantiated in some measure the results of our investigation. However, in our work some differences as regards the position of the mixed alpha-gamma fields were found as compared to Koester's work, and we were able to detect the presence of