A study on homogenization methods for steels with varying content of ferrite, bainite and martensite

The demand of ultra high strength steel (UHSS) components increased in the last decade due to their high strength to weight ratio. The driving force in this development is the automotive industry and regulations concerning passenger safety and fuel consumption. The use of ultra high strength steel enables design of lighter car bodies with equal or better passenger safety compared to earlier car generations. The automotive industry and their suppliers need predictive tools in the development of components with tailored material properties. Components with tailored material properties are produced by hot stamping, in this process a blank is austenitized before it is formed and quenched in one step. By use of sequential heated or cooled tools, different mechanical properties distributed within the same component are achieved. In order to develop a constitutive model for components consisting of regions with varying phase content, a suitable method to describe the elasto-plastic part of the yield curve is needed. The focus of this work is on the description of the elasto-plastic constitutive model of an ultra high strength steel depending on the phase content in the material. Different volume fractions of ferrite, bainite and martensite are experimentally formed. In this study the capability of different homogenization methods on the prediction of the material response of a multi-phase steel depending on the volume fraction of formed phases is investigated. The modeling results are compared to experimental results. The prediction of the composite response using the micromechanical based double-inclusion model and pure phase measured data as well as experimentally obtained phase volume fractions of present phases showed good agreement throughout all samples tested in this study. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.