Prediction of Microstructure in High-Strength Ductile Forging Parts

Governmental, environmental and economic demands call for lighter, stiffer and at the same time cheaper products in the vehicle industry. Especially safety relevant parts have to be stiff and at the same time ductile. The strategy of this project was to improve the mechanical properties of forging steel alloys by employing a high-strength and ductile bainitic microstructure in the parts while maintaining cost effective process chains to reach these goals for high stressed forged parts. Therefore, a new steel alloy combined with an optimized process chain has been developed. To optimize the process chain with a minimum of expensive experiments, a numerical approach was developed to predict the microstructure of the steel alloy after the process chain based on FEM simulations of the forging and cooling combined with deformation-time-temperature-transformation-diagrams.