Improving the Fatigue Response of Steels through Architecture

In this project, the basic idea is to use carbon diffusion to make a controlled non-monotonic carbon profile in steel, to form a multilayer structure in steel to simultaneously minimize crack initiation and growth. This will be performed by exploiting cycles of decarburization, carburization and the phase transformations that occur from austenite during cooling. This project contains both fundamental understanding of phase transformations and fatigue performance of steels, but also in the context of the applied problem of improving the fatigue properties of steel. This project is concerned with the processing, characterizing, fatigue testing and analyzing of the “tooth” steels with architecturally designed structure.