Fe-1.72C-1.74Cr-2.56Al ultra-high carbon steel (UHCS) with uniform ultrafine-grained (UFG) and submicron carbides (SMCs) has excellent high-temperature grain boundary stability and superplastic deformation behavior. In this work, the microstructure and superplasticity of as-forged and annealed UHCS by caliber rolling at 800°C with 80% reduction were systematically studied. Compared with the as-forged rolled UHCS, the annealed rolled sample forms UFG (1 μm) and SMCs (0.6 μm), achieving the ultrafine microstructure characteristics of superplastic deformation. A peak superplasticity of 554% and high strain rate sensitivity index of 0.35 were obtained at 700 °C with tensile strain rate of . This is attributed to effective grain boundary sliding mechanisms, UFG boundaries’ high temperature stability, and strong pinning effect by high density SMCs.
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