Stress distribution in the 16MND5 bainitic steel. Experimental analysis and polycrystalline modelling

The 16MND5 bainitic steel being a two-phase material (ferrite/cementite), the X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) is the most efficient tool to determine the stress states into the ferritic phase (sin2 ψ method). The latter, coupled to the observations realized during tensile tests (specimen surface and facies), have permitted to establish criteria to describe the behavior and the damaging processes of the material on a crystallographic scale, in the lower part of the ductile-to-brittle transition region and at lower temperatures [-196 deg. C;-60 deg. C]. During the loading, the damage is observed with a Scanning Electron Microscope, while the internal stresses are determined by XRD: the stress states are less important in ferrite than in bainite (macroscopic stress), the difference not exceeding 150 MPa. A multi-scale polycrystalline model is developed concurrently with the experimental measurements: a Mori-Tanaka formulation is used to describe the elastoplastic behavior of a ferritic single crystal reinforced by cementite precipitates, while the transition to the polycrystal is achieved by a self-consistent approach. The developed modeling takes into account the temperature effects on the stress states in each phase and includes a cleavage criterion (critical value of the stress normal to [100] planes), which expresses the damage of the material: thus, it enables to predict the actual experimental behavior of the 16MND5 steel in relation to temperature, and to take into account the failure process which is fragile from -120 deg. C. Besides, it is also possible to calculate the strains of the diffracting planes, which can be compared to those measured by XRD: this enables to evaluate the heterogeneity of the strains for each crystallographic orientation. (authors)