The effect of hydrostatic pressure on the deformation behavior of maraging and HY-80 steels and its implications for plasticity theory

Abstract

Earlier results showed that the difference between the tensile and compressive strengths of tempered martensites is primarily a manifestation of the general pressure dependence of flow stress in these materials. However, the same results also showed that the volume expansion after deformation was much smaller than that predicted by the normality flow rule of plasticity theory for materials with such pressure dependence. Additional results now obtained on maraging and HY-80 steels support these conclusions. The results for all these materials exhibit a strong, but not perfect, correlation between pressure dependence, yield stress, and volume expansion. The volume expansion, however, which is believed to result primarily from the generation of new dislocations, is very small and does not appear to be essential to the pressure dependence. Most of the pressure dependence, the portion responsible for the discrepancy with the normality flow rule, may be an effect on dislocation motion. The results suggest that an appropriate plasticity model would be one in which the octahedral shear yield stress is linearly dependent on the mean pressure, but the volume change is negligible in violation of the normality flow rule. Such a model has been proposed previously for the plastic deformation of soils. However, unlike that model, the present theory includes strain hardening.