A preliminary study of material homogeneity for size effect investigations

The forged material 20 MnMoNi 55, material number 1.6310 (heat number 69906) with a heat treatment of 900 oC, water quenched, 730 oC, air cooled, was subjected to an intensive quality control consisting of chemical analysis, metallography, hardness tests, tensile tests, and impact tests. Six plates of the material were investigated, and all specimens were taken from a diagonal of each plate in three positions, outer margins and the centre of the plates. The quality control exhibits the following results: 1) The material fulfill the material specification in all respects. 2) This material is a fine grained homogeneous ferritic material of bainitic structure; neither from the chemical analysis, metallography, nor from hardness tests influences from the position of the specimens taken from the plates could be derived. 3) The tensile tests clearly revealed position dependent material properties. With the exception of one plate, one of the selected positions exhibits no natural yield strength, higher rupture strength, and lower elongation to fracture compared with the other two positions at 293 K and 573 K. 4) Many of the data obtained from the impact tests at room temperature were larger than the capacity of the impact machine, i.e. 225 Joule; the experimental condition was changed from tests at 573 K to tests at 253 K to obtain data from the transition region. The main conclusions drawn for the size effect experiments where that all the tensile test results for different specimen sizes have to be discussed with respect of the specimen positions within the plates, and that for all bend bar as well as impact experiments with different specimen sizes the notch depth to specimen width ratio a/w has to be changed from a/w = 0.2 to a/w = 0.3 to get reasonable results within the frame of the available test equipment. (author)