Abstract
An attempt has been made to establish a relationship between hardness and tensile properties for various single structured steels: ferrite, pearlite, bainite, and martensite. It is found that the proportionality constant A Y of hardness to yield strength changes from 5.79 to 3.17 and is highest for the ferrite steel and lowest for the tempered martensitic steels. A less pronounced change was found in the proportionality constant A T of hardness to tensile strength (from 3.97 to 2.72). A dependence on microstructure of the proportionality constant at 8% strain A 0.08 was found as well. This difference in A was found to be attributable mostly to the effect of different work hardening behaviours owing to different microstructures. Regression analysis shows that hardness can be expressed as a function of accessible material parameters such as composition, grain size, and transformation temperatures for various single structured steels within a certain degree of accuracy.
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