Tool Steels accounts for a huge variety of carbon and alloy steels, which are used as tools to cut, drill, form, shear, and shape ferrous and non-ferrous material in bulk or powder form. The importance of tool steels far surpluses what is generally professed be ordinary, where tool steels also find use in highly demanding and exotic applications such as jet engines, spacecrafts, and nuclear reactors. Due to the harsh service environment, tool steels are characterized by a variety of mechanical properties such as wear and corrosion resistance, hardness, toughness, and strength; these properties contribute to the specialty, uniqueness, performance and superiority of tool steels.

The chromium hot work tool steels are the most widely used in the forming and machining process such as forging and die casting applications. Due to their high toughness and shock resistance, there is a significant demand on AISI H11 chromium hot work tool steel; also used in highly stressed structural components such as aircraft landing gears. The outstanding AISI H11 characteristics are exhibited by its lath martensitic microstructure. The macro properties of materials are acknowledged to depend upon the microstructure, where the configuration of the phases associated with the material can be optimized to achieve a more reliable version of the material with extreme properties. Furthermore, grain morphology and the distribution of phases can be controlled at the micro level during manufacturing, leading to significant improvement in material properties at macro level. The overall properties of a material at the macro scale can be determined through the knowledge provided by the heterogeneous micro scale, as part of a multi-scale approach. Therefore, accurate representation of its microstructures will help to further study its behavior which shall lead in advancing and improving their properties.

In the current research, a novel microstructure generator for tool steel alloys will be used to precisely simulate complex microstructures of tool steels. The novel generating algorithm along with multiple-slip crystal plasticity based model and specialize spectral solver formulations are used to investigate high-speed tools steels behavior. The spectral method for elastoviscoplastic boundary value problems implicitly uses fast Fourier transformation algorithm (FFT) by applying periodic BCs. Both quasi-static and dynamic uniaxial tensile loading in the  direction is applied on a RVE of AISI H11 martensitic tool steel. Validating the numerical results with the experimental results of tool steels is presented. Shear slip localization has been observed within the lath microstructure of martensitic materials. Such models can be used not only to predict high-strength steels behaviour, but also open the gateway to new material design and optimization.


Three-Dimensional Crystal Plasticity Modelling of High-Strength Tool Steels Using Fourier Based Spectral Solver

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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