Microscopic plasticity and damage in two-phase steels: on the competing role of crystallography and phase contrast

TL;DR

This study systematically investigates how crystallography and phase contrast influence plasticity and damage in two-phase steels, revealing that phase contrast dominates at high contrasts, while crystallography remains relevant at lower contrasts.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the relative roles of crystallography and phase contrast in micromechanical behavior of two-phase steels across diverse microstructures.

Findings

Plastic response converges for crystal plasticity and isotropic models at high phase contrast.

Phase contrast dominates when the hard phase yield stress is four times higher than the soft phase.

Fracture initiation is primarily governed by local phase arrangement.

Abstract

This paper unravels micromechanical aspects of metallic materials whose microstructure comprises grains of two or more phases. The local plastic response is determined by (i) the relative misorientation of the slip systems of individual grains, and (ii) the different mechanical properties of the phases. The relative importance of these two mechanisms at the meso-scale is unclear: is the plastic response dominated by the grain's anisotropy, or is this effect overwhelmed by the mechanical contrast between the two phases? The answer impacts the modeling of such a material at the meso-scale, but also gives insights in the resulting fracture mechanisms at that length-scale. Until now, this question has been addressed only for particular crystallographies and mechanical properties. In contrast, this paper studies the issue systematically using a large set of phase distributions, crystallographies, and material parameters. It is found that the macroscopic and the mesoscopic (grain-averaged) plastic response of the two extreme modeling choices (crystal plasticity or isotropic plasticity) converge with increasing phase contrast. The effect of the crystallography is completely overwhelmed by the phase contrast when the yield stress of the hard phase is a factor of four higher compared to the soft phase. When this ratio is lower than two, its influence may not be neglected. However, even in this regime, fracture initiation is controlled by the local arrangement of the phases. The latter is quantified in this paper through the average arrangement of the phases around fracture initiation sites.