Microstructure Design of Tempered Martensite by Atomistically Informed Full-Field Simulation: From Quenching to Fracture.

Martensitic steels form a material class with a versatile range of properties that can be selected by varying the processing chain. In order to study and design the desired processing with the minimal experimental effort, modeling tools are required. In this work, a full processing cycle from quenching over tempering to mechanical testing is simulated with a single modeling framework that combines the features of the phase-field method and a coupled chemo-mechanical approach.

Atomistically Informed Extended Gibbs Energy Description for Phase-Field Simulation of Tempering of Martensitic Steel.

In this study we propose a unified multi-scale chemo-mechanical description of the BCT (Body-Centered Tetragonal) to BCC (Body-Centered Cubic) order-disorder transition in martensitic steel by adding the mechanical degrees of freedom to the standard CALPHAD (CALculation of PHAse Diagrams) type Gibbs energy description. The model takes into account external strain, the effect of carbon composition on the lattice parameter and elastic moduli. The carbon composition effect on the lattice parameters and elastic constants is described by a sublattice model with properties obtained from DFT (Density Functional Theory) calculations; the temperature dependence of the elasticity parameters is estimated from available experimental data.