An attempt to integrate software tools at microscale and above towards an ICME approach for heat treatment of a DP steel gear with reduced distortion

Finite element simulation of heat treatment cycles in steel could be challenging when it involves phase transformation at the microscale. An ICME approach that can take into account the microstructure changes during the heat treatment and the corresponding changes in the macroscale properties could greatly help these simulations. Dual phase steel (DP steel) are potential alternate materials for gears with reduced distortion. Inter-critical annealing in DP steel involves phase transformation at the microscale and the finite element simulation of this heat treatment could be greatly improved by such an ICME approach. In the present work, phase field modeling implemented in the software package Micress is used to simulate the microstructure evolution during inter-critical annealing. Asymptotic Homogenization is used to predict the effective macroscale thermoelastic properties from the simulated microstructure. The macroscale effective flow curves are obtained by performing Virtual Testing on the phase field simulated microstructure using Finite Element Method. All the predicted effective properties are then passed on to the macro scale Finite Element simulation software Simufact Forming, where the heat treatment cycle for the inter-critical annealing is simulated. The thermal profiles from this simulation are extracted and passed on to microscale to repeat the process chain. All the simulation softwares are integrated together to implement a multi-scale simulation, aiming towards ICME approach.