Heat sources, energy storage and dissipation in high-strength steels: Experiments and modelling

Tensile tests on three high-strength steels exhibiting Luders band propagation are carried out at room temperature and under quasi-static loading conditions. Displacement and temperature fields on the surface of the flat samples are measured by digital image correlation and digital infrared thermography, respectively. The true stress versus true strain curves were calculated from the displacement data, while the thermal data were used to estimate the heat sources using the local heat diffusion equation. Based on these measurements the stored and dissipated energies were estimated up to diffuse necking. A thermodynamically consistent elastic-plastic constitutive model including the von Mises yield criterion, the associated flow rule and two non-linear isotropic hardening variables is applied to describe the behaviour of the high-strength steels. It is shown that this simple model is able to reproduce both the local behaviour, such as the power associated to heat sources, and the global behaviour, such as Luders band propagation and stored and dissipated energies. It is further shown that the ratio of dissipated power to plastic power varies during plastic straining and that this variation is captured reasonably well in the numerical simulations. (C) 2009 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.