Numerical Modeling of Interphase in Dual-Phase (DP) Steels

Nano-Hardness experiments have shown that in dual-phase (DP) steels, the transition between the hard and soft phases is not sudden. This gradient of mechanical properties can be explained by existence of transformation-induced geometrically necessary dislocations (GND) created during manufacturing of the steel.

In this project, an in-house Matlab code was used to create-two phase RVEs from microscopy images. The resulting structure is then processed to generate an interphase between the two phases in which each element is assigned a distance to each phase. Then, different interpolation functions are used for simulating the change in hardness observed in the experiments.