Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Studying steel microstructures yields important insights regarding its mechanical characteristics. Within steel, microstructures transform based on a multitude of factors including chemical composition, transformation temperatures, and cooling rates.
Martensite-austenite MA islands in bainitic steel appear as blocky structures with abstract shapes that are difficult to identify and differentiate from other types of microstructures. In this regard, material science may benefit from machine learning models that are able to automatically and accurately detect these structures. However, the training process of the state-of-the-art machine learning models requires a large amount of high-quality data.
In this dataset, we provide 1. We envision that this dataset will be useful for material scientists to explore the relationship between the morphology of bainitic steel and mechanical characteristics.
Moreover, computer vision researchers and practitioners may use this data for training state-of-the-art object segmentation models for abstract geometries such as MA islands. Bainitic steels have many uses in civil engineering such as production of rails, pipelines, and other forgings, as well as in the automotive industry to manufacture steering knuckles or chassis components. The versatile use is related to its outstanding combination of high strength and toughness 1 , 2 , 3. These properties are depending on chemical composition, transformation temperature, and cooling rate as they influence the bainitic microstructure.
The microstructure is composed of a carbon-depleted primary phase and a carbon-rich-secondary phase 4. Bainite arises from a mixture of shear mechanism without diffusion and a diffusion-controlled formation, but it remains unsettled which mechanism is dominant 5.
