Ultrastrong materials can notably help with improving the energy efficiency of transportation vehicles by reducing their weight. Grain refinement by severe plastic deformation is, so far, the most effective approach to produce bulk strong nanostructured metals, but its scaling up for industrial production has been a challenge. Here, we report an ultrastrong (2.15 GPa) low-carbon nanosteel processed by heterostructure and interstitial mediated warm rolling. The nanosteel consists of thin (~17.8 nm) lamellae, which was enabled by two unreported mechanisms: (i) improving deformation compatibility of dual-phase heterostructure by adjusting warm rolling temperature and (ii) segregating carbon atoms to lamellar boundaries to stabilize the nanolamellae. Defying our intuition, warm rolling produced finer lamellae than cold rolling, which demonstrates the potential and importance of tuning deformation compatibility of interstitial containing heterostructure for nanocrystallization. This previously unreported approach is applicable to most low-carbon, low-alloy steels for producing ultrahigh strength materials in industrial scale.

超强材料可以显着帮助减轻运输车辆的重量，从而提高其能源效率。迄今为止，通过剧烈的塑性变形来细化晶粒是生产块状强纳米结构金属的最有效方法，但将其放大以用于工业生产一直是一个挑战。在这里，我们报道了一种通过异质结构和间隙介导的热轧加工而成的超强（2.15 GPa）低碳纳米钢。纳米钢由薄的（〜17.8 nm）薄片组成，这是由两种未报道的机制实现的：（i）通过调节热轧温度来改善双相异质结构的变形相容性;（ii）将碳原子隔离到薄片边界以稳定纳米薄片。违反我们的直觉，热轧比冷轧产生的薄片更细，这证明了调整含间隙的异质结构的变形相容性对于纳米晶化的潜力和重要性。这种以前未报道的方法适用于大多数低碳，低合金钢，用于工业规模生产超高强度材料。