Hot workability and microstructure evolution of wire arc additive manufactured 300M steel

Wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) technology offers a material-saving and efficient method of manufacturing the 300M steel components, but the obtained microstructure and properties hardly reach the level of wrought materials. By combining WAAM technology with forging process, a novel forming process is proposed. The preferred shape pre-forgings are easily prepared, and the number of forging steps significantly decreases. The WAAMed as-cast microstructure also can be transformed into the wrought state by the proposed forming process. The aim of this study is to investigate the hot deformation behavior and microstructure evolution of WAAMed 300M steel under various deformation temperatures and strain rates. The results show that the WAAMed 300M steel exhibits a higher plastic deformation resistance than the wrought 300M steel. With the increase of deformation temperature and strain rate, the difference of flow stress between the WAAMed and wrought 300M steel decreases. The hot deformation activation energy of WAAMed 300M steel is calculated as 374.1 kJ/mol, which is much higher than that of wrought 300M steel (332.3 kJ/mol). The possible processing windows obtained from the hot deformation activation energy maps are 1040-1120 °C/0.01-10 s⁻¹ for the WAAMed 300M steel and 1010-1130 °C/ 0.1-10 s⁻¹ for the wrought 300M steel. The constitutive model considering strain compensation is established to describe the hot deformation behaviors of WAAMed and wrought 300M steel. The high correlation coefficient and low average absolute relative error confirm the suitability of the developed constitutive models for predicting the flow stresses of WAAMed and wrought 300M steel.