Large deformation of anisotropic austenitic stainless steel sheets at room temperature: Multi-axial experiments and phenomenological modeling

A newly developed multi-axial testing technique for sheet materials is employed to investigate the inelastic response of a temper-rolled stainless steel 301LN under isothermal quasi-static loading conditions at room temperature. The experimental technique consists of a flat sheet specimen, which is subject to combinations of shear and normal loading using a custom-made dual-actuator system, The large deformation behavior under monotonic loading is determined along more than 20 distinct radial paths in the stress space. The experimental results indicate that Hill's quadratic yield function along with an associated flow rule provides a good approximation of the initial yield behavior of this anisotropic two-phase FCC/BCC sheet material. Based on the experimental data for radial monotonic loading, it is concluded that conventional isotropic-kinematic hardening models cannot successfully describe the strain hardening of this austenitic steel. Instead, a non-associated anisotropic hardening model is proposed that relates the increase in yield strength to an isothermal martensitic transformation kinetics law. The comparison of the model predictions with the experimental results shows very good agreement for all biaxial and uniaxial experiments. (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.