Modeling elasto-plastic behavior of polycrystalline grain structure of steels at mesoscopic level

The multiscale model is proposed to explicitly account for the inhomogeneous structure of polycrystalline materials. Grains and grain boundaries are modeled explicitly using Voronoi tessellation. The constitutive model of crystal grains utilizes anisotropic elasticity and crystal plasticity. Commercially available finite element code is applied to solve the boundary value problem defined at the macroscopic scale. No assumption regarding the distribution of the mesoscopic strain and stress fields is used, apart the finite element discretization. The proposed model is then used to estimate the minimum size of polycrystalline aggregate of selected reactor pressure vessel steel (22 NiMoCr 3 7), above which it can be considered macroscopically homogeneous. Elastic and rate-independent plastic deformation modes are considered. The results are validated by the experimental and simulation results from the literature.