Characterisation and quantification of microstructural banding in dual phase steels Part 1 – General 2D study

In order to quantify the degree of banding in dual phase steel, optical micrographs of various dual phased steel microstructures have been analysed. From the binary images of the micrographs, greyscale profiles are created and used to define the bands within the image. Two parameters are calculated from the defined bands: band continuity index C_b and perpendicular continuity index C_p. The first parameter quantitatively describes the continuity of each band along the direction of banding, while the second parameter quantitatively describes the continuity of the bands perpendicular to the banding direction. Both parameters are bounded on [0,1], with 0 indicating no banding and 1 indicating strong banding.