Failure Initiation in Dual-Phase Steel

Abstract

This research work aims to model the failure initiation in dual-phase (DP) steel. A microstructure based approach by means of representative volume elements (RVE) is employed to evaluate the microstructure deformation and the failure initiation on the mesoscale. In order to determine cohesive parameters for martensite cracking, a two level approach has been performed experimentally. First, in-situ bending test in SEM with EBSD measurements before and after the test showed that the crack initiation occurs in martensite islands. Then, mini tensile tests with DIC technique were carried out to identify macroscopic failure initiation strain values. RVE modeling combined with extended finite element method (XFEM) was utilized to model martensite cracking on mesoscale. The identified parameters were validated by comparing the predictions with the experimental results.