Micromechanical origins of remarkable elongation-to-fracture in AHSS TRIP steels via continuous bending under tension

Abstract

Continuous bending under tension (CBT) is known to achieve elongation-to-failure well above that achieved under a conventional uniaxial simple tension (ST) strain path. However, the detailed mechanism for supplying this increased ductility has not been fully understood. It is clear that the necking that occurs in a typical ST specimen is avoided by constantly moving the region of plastic deformation during the CBT process. The volume of material in which the flow stress is greatest is limited to a moving line where the rollers contact the sheet and superimpose bending stress on the applied tensile load. Hence the condition of a large volume of material experiencing stress greater than the material flow stress, leading to strain localization during ST, is avoided. However, the magnitude of the contribution of this phenomenon to the overall increase in elongation is unclear. In the current set of experiments, an elongation to fracture (ETF) of 4.56x and 3.7x higher than ST was achieved by fine-tuning CBT forming parameters for Q&P 1180 and TBF 1180, respectively. A comparison of maximum local strains near the final point of fracture in ST and CBT sheets via digital image correlation revealed that avoidance of localization of plastic strain during CBT accounts for less than half of the increased elongation in the CBT specimens for two steels containing different amounts of retained austenite (RA). Geometrically necessary dislocation evolution is monitored using high-resolution EBSD (HREBSD) for both strain paths, indicating a lower hardening rate in the CBT samples in the bulk of the sheet, potentially relating to the cyclical nature of the stress in the outer layers of the sheet. Interestingly, the GND evolution in the center of the sheet, which does not experience the same amplitude of cyclic stress, follows the ST behavior more closely than the sheet edges. This appears to contribute to a precipitous drop in residual ductility for the specimens that are pulled in ST after partial CBT processing. The rate of transformation of RA is also tracked in the steels, with a significantly lower rate of transformation during CBT, compared to ST. This suggests that a slower transformation rate achieved under CBT also contributed to higher strain-to-failure levels.