There is a long and lively debate in the literature about the origin of the Bauschinger effect in polycrystalline materials, the most widely accepted explanation being the easier movement of dislocations during reverse loading causing the reduction of the yield stress. Other explanations include incompatible deformation at the grain scale and change of dislocation cell structures during forward and reverse loading, but recent publications show these phenomenological explanations of the Bauschinger effect are not holistic. In the experimental work presented here, we have investigated the role of micro residual lattice strain on the origin of the Bauschinger effect in type 316H austenitic stainless steel using in-situ neutron diffraction. Standard cylindrical specimens were tensioncompression load cycled at room temperature with the loading interrupted at incrementally larger compressive and tensile strains followed by reloading to the tensile loop peak strain. Mirror symmetric cyclic tests were also performed with tensile and compressive load interruptions followed by compressive reloading to the compressive 2 loop peak strain. A strong correlation is demonstrated between the evolution of residual lattice strain in the grain families and the change in magnitude in macroscopic yield stress, peak stress and the shape of the yielding part of the stress-strain curve for both the cyclic tension yield and compression yield tests. This implies that the residual lattice strain generated by grain scale elastic and plastic deformation anisotropy is the primary source of the Bauschinger kinematic hardening effect observed in type 316H austenitic stainless steel.
The creep life and deformation behaviour of high-temperature steels can be significantly affected by the prior plastic loading. This effect is partly due to the generation of intergranular strains from the grain-scale elastic and plastic anisotropic deformation during plastic loading. This paper investigates the effect of these plasticity generated intergranular strains on the subsequent creep strain accumulation behavior in type 316H stainless steel. An in-situ synchrotron diffraction experiment was conducted at 550°C, where the sample was loaded incrementally to different magnitudes of plastic strain, followed by a displacement-controlled stress relaxation dwell at each of this stage. The lattice strains of 4 grain families were measured during these stages. It was found that the intergranular strains generated during the plastic deformation significantly affect the relative magnitude of creep strain accumulation in different grain families. A subtle but significant difference has been observed between the creep intergranular strain accumulation behavior and the plastic intergranular strain accumulation behavior in different grain families which can be used to interrogate the validity of any micromechanical models’ formulation for creep and plastic deformation. The macroscopic stress relaxations measured from the experiment were compared with the prediction from a novel crystal plasticity based micromechanical model developed in our group. A good overall match was found between the experiment and the model regarding the magnitude of stress relaxation after various level of plasticity. The experiments have demonstrated that the model requires further development to accurately predict the rate of stress relaxation and the micro scale lattice strain evolution during creep.
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