A formal kinetic approach was applied to the spread of isothermal martensite over the neighboring austenite grains in a Fe-23.2 wt. (%) Ni-2.8 wt. (%) Mn alloy. The number of grains in a spread event changed with parent austenite grain size. However, isothermal martensite spread formed from fine-grained parent austenite and athermal martensite from a Fe-31 wt. (%) Ni-0.02 wt. (%) C alloy studied in a previous work followed the same microstructural path. The number of grains per spread- event found in the present study was shown to be consistent with the number of neighbors of the grain originating the spread event by means of a simple geometrical model of the parent austenite grain network. The study of the kinetics of isothermal martensite spread showed that the nucleation rate of the spread-event in isothermal martensite remained constant during the transformation. This result parallels the constant nucleation rate of the spread-event also found using the same methodology in athermal martensite formed in a Fe-31 wt. (%) Ni-0.02 wt. (%) C alloy studied in a previous work.
martensitic phase transformation; kinetics; microstructure; analytical methods; grain-size effects
