Quantification and Characterization of Microdamage Resistance in Metals for Designing High-Strength Ductile Microstructures

Abstract

ConspectusFractures in metallic materials such as ductile austenitic, ferritic, and dual-phase steels often occur after significant plastic deformation. The dislocation-driven plasticity enhances the microscopic stress concentration and induces vacancies (e.g., by the jogged screw dislocation motion), resulting in microstructure-scale cracks and voids at specific crystallographic planes or microstructure boundaries. (Hereafter, cracks and voids are referred to as damage.) In addition, plasticity plays important roles in microscopic damage growth in terms of damage tip blunting and coalescence. In fact, plasticity-related damage evolution in various fracture phenomena such as metal fatigue and hydrogen embrittlement still contains many uncertainties, particularly in high-strength materials containing fine and complex microstructures. Therefore, microscopy-based damage quantification and characterization are required for designing damage-resistant microstructures. In this context, because damage evolution is a multiscale phenomenon from atomistic to over millimeter scales, the target size of damage in the measurements is important to realize reliable analyses. The intrinsic origin of damage evolution is an atomistic/nanometer scale phenomenon, which requires transmission electron microscopy for its analysis. However, from mechanical viewpoints, revealing damage nucleation behavior is not necessary, because general mechanical analyses are performed for oversubmicrometer-sized damages that can be observed by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Hence, submicrometer/micrometer-sized damage is the major target in this damage quantification. As a post-mortem analysis method, the damage area fraction, the number of damages, the damage size, and the damage shape at various plastic strains can be quantified by observing micrometer-sized damages. In the case of monotonic tensile deformation, the number density of damages plotted against strain indicate the damage initiation probability. In addition, when damages stop growing, a strain range where the average damage size remains nearly constant appears. The strain range quantitatively indicates damage arrestability. For instance, dual-phase steel consisting of soft and hard body-centered cubic phases clearly shows three strain-dependent damage evolution regimes: (1) damage incubation regime (no damage appears), (2) damage arrest regime (damage initiates, but stops growing immediately), and (3) damage growth regime. Hydrogen uptake increases damage initiation probability and decreases damage arrestability. Specifically, a comparison of the quantified damage parameters between specimens with and without hydrogen revealed that large amounts of hydrogen in the dual-phase steel degrades the resistance to microscopic damage growth, which critically decreases the macroscopic ductility. In this case, the damage arrestability (damage growth resistance) is more important than crack initiation resistance, which is dependent on the dislocation-driven stress accommodation capability of soft microstructure components surrounding the crack initiation site. Thus, damage quantification enables the evaluation and classification of microscopic problems in plasticity-related fractures. After the classification of the problems, the underlying mechanisms for damage initiation and growth must be clarified separately. To reveal the mechanisms, full-field micrometer-scale strain mapping and site-specific dislocation characterization are required for damage initiation and growth. To fulfill these demands, new techniques were developed, such as micrometer-scale replica digital image correlation and dislocation-resolved in situ electron channeling contrast imaging. Based on the deformation/dislocation characterization results, metallurgical models of damage evolution can be developed, enabling to propose a mechanism-based microstructure-design strategy for creating damage-resistant high-strength materials.