Development of new cyclic plasticity model for 304LN stainless steel through simulation and experimental investigation

• New isotropic, cyclic and kinematic hardening formulations are proposed.
• Good correlations of fatigue characteristics with experiments are demonstrated.
• Cyclic hardening and softening of 304LN steel are simulated by the proposed model.
• Proposed formulation of ratcheting parameter has improved the simulation results.
• Micro structural investigations are illustrated with the macroscopic observations.

Cyclic plastic deformation characteristics of 304LN stainless steel material have been studied with two proposed cyclic plasticity models. Model MM-I has been proposed to improve the simulation of ratcheting phenomenon and model MM-II has the capability to simulate both cyclic hardening and softening characteristics of the material at various strain ranges. In the present paper, strain controlled simulations are performed with constant, increasing and decreasing strain amplitudes to verify the influences of loading schemes on cyclic plasticity behaviors through simulations and experiments. It is observed that the material 304LN exhibits non Masing characteristics under cyclic plastic deformation. The measured deviation from Masing is well established from the simulation as well as from experiment. Simulation result shows that the assumption of only isotropic hardening is unable to explain the hardening or softening characteristics of the material in low cycle fatigue test. The introduction of memory stress based cyclic hardening coefficient and an exponentially varying ratcheting parameter in the recall term of kinematic hardening rule, have resulted in exceptional improvement in the ratcheting simulation with the proposed model, MM-II. Plastic energy, shape and size of the hysteresis loops are additionally used to verify the nature of cyclic plasticity deformations. Ratcheting test and simulation have been performed to estimate the accumulated plastic strain with different mean and amplitude stresses. In the proposed model MM-I, a new proposition is incorporated for yield stress variation based on the memory stress of loading history along with the evolution of ratcheting parameter with an exponential function of plastic strain. These formulations lead to better realization of ratcheting rate in the transient cycles for all loading schemes. Effect of mean stress on the plastic energy is examined by the simulation model, MM-I. Finally, the micro structural investigation from transmission electronic microscopy is used to correlate the macroscopic and microscopic non Masing behavior of the material.