Influence of Microstructure on Damage in Advanced High Strength Steels

Abstract

AHSS (Advanced High Strength Steels) combine high strength and good ductility. Their outstanding forming and work-hardening behavior predestines these steels for fabrication of strength relevant structural elements and automobile body parts. To characterize a material, not only tensile, but also hole-expansion and bending behavior are important and help predict the stretch-flange-formability. In this study, detailed analyses of the correlation between these three tests and the damage mechanisms during forming have been performed for selected steels. The results show that for AHSS one should differentiate between “local” and “global” failure. Furthermore, not only are certain materials more sensitive to local or global damage, but also various testing methods tend to provoke either local or global damage. Tensile testing provokes global failure whereas hole-expansion tends to induce local failure. A specimen fails during bending with a mixture of local and global modes. These failure modes are strongly attributed to the microstructure. DP-steels yield high elongation during tensile testing and poorer hole-expansion values. High-resolution EBSD has revealed that the microstructure of DP-steels is sensitive to localized damage, which is compensated by work-hardening around damaged regions and thus shifts the loading to un-hardened regions. This makes DP-microstructures well-suited to tensile loading but sensitive to hole-expansion. CP-steels of comparable strength show poorer tensile elongation and higher hole-expansion ratios due to a microstructure which is not sensitive to localized failure (but has limited capacity for work-hardening). The failure mode in TRIP-steels exhibits a similar character as in DP-steels, but only after the martensitic transformation of retained austenite.