A study of the unloading behaviour of dual phase steel

It is important to understand the strain recovery of a steel sheet in order to predict its springback behaviour. During strain recovery, the stress–strain relation is non-linear and the resulting unloading modulus is decreased. Moreover, the unloading modulus will degrade with increasing plastic pre-straining. This study aims at adding new knowledge on these phenomena and the mechanisms causing them. The unloading behaviour of the dual-phase steel DP600 is characterised experimentally and finite element (FE) simulations of a representative volume element (RVE) of the microstructure are performed. The initial stress and strain state of the micromechanical FE model is found by a simplified simulation of the annealing processes. It is observed from the experimental characterisation that the decrease of the initial stiffness of the unloading is the main reason for the degrading unloading modulus. Furthermore, the developed micromechanical FE model exhibits non-linear strain recovery due to local plasticity caused by interaction between the two phases.