Institute of Metals Division - The System Chromium-Carbon - Discussion

P. Coheur and L. Habraken—We read this paper with great interest and are glad to congratulate the authors for their valuable work, supplying an important contribution to the mechanism of tempering on the carbides in vanadium steels. We are in a good position to appreciate this work since we have been studying, for more than a year, Cr-Mo steels of a composition similar, but less highly alloyed (namely 0.1 pct C, 3 pct Cr, 1 pct Mo). Our results are quite in concordance with the authors', however, we wish to point out that it is very interesting to use equally the electron microscope in order to observe the variations of microstructure in steels. We have studied simultaneously the evolution of the carbides in situ with the electron microscope, and, after extraction, again with the electron microscope, and then with X-rays. The first results which we have obtained have been communicated at the Congress of Delft (July 1949) and at the "Journees de la Metallurgie" in Paris (October 1949). These may be summarized as follows: After tempering with varying either the tempering temperatures or the tempering times, the carbides show two evolutions. The first one is connected to the carbides existing in the steels, principally in the boundaries of the grains. For some groups of steels these carbides may coalesce and for other groups they may