On Extracting Stress–Strain Curves of Porous Multi-Phase Sintered Steels by Microindentation

The efficient characterization of material properties of porous multi-phase sintered steels by instrumental indentation is still an open question. To the authors’ knowledge, so far only a characterization of single-phase porous sintered steel by nanoindenation has been reported in literature. This paper for the first time offers a study about the applicability of microindentation techniques for characterizing the matrix material in a multi-phase sintered steel. This preliminary study is motivated by the relatively wide availability of necessary equipment, and simplicity of material identification procedures.

Herein, a dual-phase ferrite/bainite Astaloy steel with 9% porosity is studied. Various commonly used methods for the reconstruction of stress–strain curves from microindentation data are considered, whereby both Vickers and spherical tips are used. In addition, some homogeneous solid materials are investigated to better asses the performance of applied identification procedures. Two approaches for the mesoscale identification of the considered sintered steel are attempted. The first one is based on the identification of individual material phases, while in the other one the homogenization of the metallic matrix is adopted. To assess the reliability of obtained parameters, the direct numerical simulation of representative volume elements of realistic steel microstructure subjected to uniaxial tension is conducted. Numerical results are compared with the data from the macroscopic uniaxial tensile test.

The obtained results indicate that microindentation is adequate for the identification of elastic properties of individual material phases, but results for local plastic parameters are largely inconclusive and a further analysis is needed, focusing on applying smaller forces and investigating the influence of pores on identification results. Nevertheless, it seems that macroscopic stress–strain curves could be captured more accurately by the methodology based on the matrix homogenization if relatively large indentation forces are applied.