Effect of Copper and Nickel on the Transformation Kinetics of Austempered Ductile Iron

The kinetics of reaction occurring during the austempering treatment of ductile iron (DI) containing different additions of Cu and Ni was investigated in this work. DI bars were heat treated in an instrumented dilatometer in order to follow the exhibited transformation kinetics. The dilatometric results indicated that the addition of Cu alone did not have a significant effect on the incubation times for the austempering transformation. Also, the addition of both, Cu and Ni resulted in a significant effect on reducing the transformation rates. It was found that the austempering process is characterized by two clearly distinguished transformation stages. In the initial stage, the addition of Cu, and to a greater extent, additions of both Cu and Ni led to reductions in the transformation rates shifting the maximum transformation rate values toward longer times. The outcome of this work indicates that during the first stage of austempering, nucleation of the ferrite plates occurs via a diffusionless mechanism while their growth is diffusion controlled. Moreover, after the maximum in the transformation rate has been reached, the growth of ferrite plates becomes dominant with the rate-limiting step becoming the diffusion of C into the surrounding austenite. A qualitative model for the austempering transformation is proposed in this work to account for the experimental observations.