Multiscale modeling of the mechanical behaviour of pearlitic steel

Journal article, 2012

Pearlitic steel is a two-phase material with cementite lamellae embedded in a ferrite matrix. In this contribution a representative microscale model, capturing the behavior of the cementite and the ferrite and also the interaction between these phases, is proposed. The response from the micromodel is coupled by means of computational homogenization to a representative mesomodel containing grains, or colonies, of pearlite. The material parameters of the ferrite and the cementite are identified by calibrating the model to experimental data for the pearlitic steel R260. Different types of prolongation conditions, i.e. how to couple the mesoscale kinematics to the microscale kinematics, are investigated and their results are compared. Finally, the influence of the number of cementite directions and the number of crystallographic orientations on the macroscopic stress response is studied. Thereby, a sufficient mesomodel size is estimated.