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The microstructure of a two-phase medium manganese steel is decorated by interfaces whose character is defined by crystallography and the misorientation between adjacent grains, which in turn influences elemental segregation and shapes the resulting decorations. This study investigates how adjacent grain and phase boundaries impact a boundary’s segregation behavior, with a focus on the competition for carbon (C) enrichment in a laminated ferrite (α)- austenite (γ) microstructure subjected to a series of heat treatments. It was found that semicoherent α-γ Kurdjumov-Sachs (KS) phase boundaries show less carbon segregation than general γ grain boundaries. Furthermore, when a γ grain boundary is present at a junction with the phase boundaries, it acts as an extracting agent for C. DFT calculations support these observations, demonstrating that carbon segregation is energetically more favorable at the γ grain boundary compared to the α/γ phase boundary, due to the more negative segregation energy at the former.
Enabling a hydrogen economy requires the development of materials resistant to hydrogen embrittlement (HE). More than 100 years of research have led to several mechanisms and models describing how hydrogen interacts with lattice defects and leads to mechanical property degradation. However, solutions to protect materials from hydrogen are still scarce. Here, we investigate the role of interstitial solutes in protecting critical crystalline defects sensitive to hydrogen. Ab initio calculations show that boron and carbon in solid solutions at grain boundaries can efficiently prevent hydrogen segregation. We then realized this interface protection concept on martensitic steel, a material strongly prone to HE, by doping the most sensitive interfaces with different concentrations of boron and carbon. These segregations, in addition to stress relaxations, critically reduce the hydrogen ingress by half, leading to an unprecedented resistance against HE. This tailored interstitial segregation strategy can be extended to other metallic materials susceptible to hydrogen-induced interfacial failure.
