On the interplay of friction and stress relaxation to improve stretch-flangeability of dual phase (DP600) steel.

Industrial servo presses have been used to successfully demonstrate improved formability when deforming sheet metals. While the time dependent viscoplastic behavior of material is attributed to the observed formability improvement, much less effort has been devoted to understand and quantify the underlying mechanisms. In this context, the hole expansion test (HET) of a dual phase steel was interrupted at pre-defined punch travel heights to understand the time-dependent effects on stretch-flangeability. The effect of pre-strain, hold time and edge quality on hole expansion ratio (HER) improvement was studied. The present study shows that the HER improves significantly in interrupted HET. This improved HER is due to the combined effects of stress relaxation and friction on deformation behavior. The ductility improvement estimated from uniaxial stress relaxation tests was used to estimate the contribution of stress relaxation and friction, respectively, in HET. This study shows that friction plays a significant role in improving HER at high pre-strain. It was also demonstrated that frictional effects are largely influenced by edge quality.

Effect of Cryogenic Grinding on Fatigue Life of Additively Manufactured Maraging Steel.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is replacing conventional manufacturing techniques due to its ability to manufacture complex structures with near-net shape and reduced material wastage. However, the poor surface integrity of the AM parts deteriorates the service life of the components. The AM parts should be subjected to post-processing treatment for improving surface integrity and fatigue life. In this research, maraging steel is printed using direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) process and the influence of grinding on the fatigue life of this additively manufactured material was investigated. For this purpose, the grinding experiments were performed under two different grinding environments such as dry and cryogenic conditions using a cubic boron nitride (CBN) grinding wheel. The results revealed that surface roughness could be reduced by about 87% under cryogenic condition over dry grinding. The fatigue tests carried out on the additive manufactured materials exposed a substantial increase of about 170% in their fatigue life when subjected to cryogenic grinding.

Grain boundary sliding and non-constancy strain during stress relaxation of pure Mg.

Stress relaxation during plastic deformation has been reported to improve ductility of metallic materials. In this study, the stress relaxation behaviour in pure magnesium is investigated during interrupted uniaxial tensile tests. During intermittent stopping of the machine for relaxation studies, the total strain is expected to remain constant. However, an anomalous non-constancy in total strain is observed in the present work. The total strain increases with relaxation time. Additional in-situ tensile tests indicate that the non-constant total strain is restricted only in the gauge area of the specimen, indicating a likely shear dominated deformation such as grain boundary sliding (GBS) responsible for the anomalous behaviour. The role of GBS during relaxation is studied using the deformation induced evolution of surface inhomogeneity. Determinations of surface profiling step heights at grain boundaries and inclination of grains were used to quantify the effect of GBS. The estimated activation volume of 4.35 b 3 further confirms the role of slip induced GBS on the deformation. A new stress relaxation model accommodating GBS is proposed and is found to fit the experimental data accurately.