Analysis of Particle Size and Interface Effects on the Strength and Ductility of Advanced High Strength Steels

Abstract

This thesis is devoted to the numerical investigation of mechanical behavior of Dual phase (DP) steels. Such grade of advanced high strength steels (AHSS) is favorable to the automotive industry due the unique properties such as high strength and ductility with low finished cost. Many experimental and numerical studies have been done to achieve the optimized behavior of DP steels by controlling their microstructure. Experiments are costly and time consuming so in recent years numerical tools are utilized to help the metallurgist before doing experiments. Most of the numerical studies are based on classical (local) constitutive models where no material length scale parameters are incorporated in the model.

Although these models are proved to be very effective in modeling the material behavior in the large scales but they fail to address some critical phenomena which are important for our goals. First, they fail to address the size effect phenomena which materials show at microstructural scale. This means that materials show stronger behavior at small scales compared to large scales. Another issue with classical models is the mesh size dependency in modeling the softening behavior of materials. This means that in the finite element context (FEM) the results will be mesh size dependent and no converged solution exist upon mesh refinement. Thereby by applying the classical (local) models one my loose the accuracy on measuring the strength and ductility of DP steels. Among the non-classical (nonlocal) models, gradient-enhanced plasticity models which consider the effect of neighboring point on the behavior of one specific point are proved to be numerically effective and versatile tools to accomplish the two concerns mentioned above. So in this thesis a gradient-enhanced plasticity model which incorporates both the energetic and dissipative material length scales is derived based on the laws of thermodynamics. This model also has a consistent yield-like function for the interface which is an essential part of the higher-order gradient theories.

The main issue with utilizing these theories is the implementation which limits the application of these theories for modeling the real problems. Here a straightforward implementation method based on the classical FEM and Meshless method will be proposed which due to its simplicity it can be applied for many problems. The application of the developed model and implementation will be shown on removing the mesh size dependency and capturing the size effect in microstructure level of dual phase steels.