According to Table 1 of the results, the hardness of alloy steel AISI 7225 is

higher than the carbon steel AISI 1191 at the annealing time of 0 and 10 minutes but the
hardness of carbon steel is higher than the alloy steel at the 20 minutes. Therefore, the
comparison between the hardness of the alloy steel and the carbon steel is done by using
the 0 minute time as the default data .The results showed that when the annealing time
increases, the hardness increases for both the alloy and the carbon steel. The carbon
content of an alloy steel is basically. Basically carbon steel can be classified as low
carbon steel, middle carbon steel and high carbon steel based on the amount of carbon
present inside the steel. The low carbon steel contain 0.3% of the carbon, the middle
carbon steel contained 0.3-0.45% of the carbon while the high carbon steel contained
0.45 to 0.75 amount of the carbon. In this experiment, the carbon steel used is the AISI
1191 and it has 0.91% of the carbon content while the AISI 7225 contained 0.25% of the
carbon content. Although the carbon content in the carbon steel is higher than the alloy
steel, but there are some nickel, chromium , manganese and silicon inside the alloy steel
which will add the strength at room temperature and increase the low temperature notch
toughness. Besides, it will make the alloy steel become harder and more durable. Such
alloy steel will also have the ability to resist the corrosion and tougher than normal steel.
Moreover, the hardness of the Alloy steel is the maximum which is 56.74 at 10 minutes
and it is harder compared with carbon steel because it is due to the impurity atom in the
alloy steel which will distort the lattice, and then generate stress. The impurity present in
the alloy will segregate around the dislocation and effectively cancel out the most of the
strain which will surround a dislocation. (Lim Yang, 2015)

According to the graph of the FIGURE 1, the hardness of both the alloy steel and carbon
steel will increase when the annealing time increases but carbon steel will increase in
hardness faster than the carbon steel. However, after both of them reached the maximum
hardness, the hardness will slowly decrease when the annealing time is prolonged. This is
because the grain will growth bigger when the annealing time is increasing, and this can
be contributed to the decrease in the hardness as microstructure become courses in grain
and has reduce the surface area.
Meanwhile, the increase in hardness of the carbon steel is faster compared with alloy
with the subsequently increase in the annealing time. This is because in alloy steel, there
is present of other element such as the nickel, chromium, manganese and silicon.
Therefore, it will have higher amount of time to transform from pearlite to austenite to be
highly harden and hereby the increase in hardness is lower compared with carbon alloy as
the elements will delays the pearlite to austenite transformation reactions, and hence less
martensite is formed and it is less harden as martensite is the highest microstructure.
(Justim,2012).

References

1) Justin. 2012. Heat Treatment of Steel. [ONLINE] Available at:

http://www.csus.edu/wac/journal/2012/lance_final_draft.pdf. [Accessed 30 July
2016].
2) Dr Brenner. 2003. Aneealing. [ONLINE] Available at:
https://www.coursehero.com/file/12211576/Sample-annealing-lab-report/.
[Accessed 30 July 2016].