Constitutive modelling of the high strain rate behaviour of interstitial-free steel

A physically based modelling and experimental investigation of the work hardening behaviour of IF steel covering a wide range of strain rates including complex strain path and/or strain rate changes are presented. In order to obtain isothermal stress–strain curves at high strain rates, a procedure has been proposed with the aid of finite element analysis. The result reveals that the apparent excess of the flow stress after a jump in strain rate, which is frequently observed in bcc metals, is in fact due to the thermal softening at large strains, and that the flow stress after a jump in strain rate tends asymptotically to the values corresponding to the curve at the new strain rate. The strain rate affects not only the short-range stress but also the long-range stress via the strain-rate dependant evolution of dislocation structures. The proposed model is based on the dislocation model of intragranular hardening proposed by Teodosiu and Hu [Teodosiu, C., Hu, Z., 1995. Evolution of the intragranular microstructure at moderate and large strains: modelling and computational significance. In: Shen, S., Dawson, P. R., (Eds.), Proceedings of Numiform'95 on Simulation of Materials Processing: Theory, Methods and Applications. Balkema, Rotterdam, pp. 173–182] and extended to strain rate sensitive one with applying the results of the thermal activation analysis. A satisfactory agreement has been achieved between model predictions and experimental results.