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Recently, micro-alloyed steels which could eliminate heat treatments after forging has been developed. These non heat-treated micro-alloyed steels have several advantages over the conventional quenched and tempered steel for cold forging. First of all, long components can be fabricated with a better dimensional accuracy since bending of long forged part after quenching treatment could be avoided. And it is possible to eliminate two energy consuming heat treatment steps, which are a spherodizing before forging and quenching/tempering after forging. Therefore, more cost effective and environment friendly process could be designed. However, there is non-uniform distribution of strain occurred across the forged part, since these non heat-treated micro-alloyed steel use strain hardening mechanism. In the present study, it was investigated how to lessen non-uniformity and increase strength together for cold forging when a baking heat treatment is applied in micro-alloyed steels. For this purpose, micro-alloyed steels developed by Se-A Besteel recently was used for the experiment.
