Microscopic plasticity and damage in two-phase steels: On the competing role of crystallography and phase contrast

•This paper studies the plastic response of two-phase metals at the meso-scale.•The phase contrast dominates the response at high values of the phase contrast.•The grain’s anisotropy has a large effect on the response at low phase contrasts.•The spatial arrangement of phases plays a crucial role for the initiation of fracture.•This holds even when the role of the grain’s anisotropy is not negligible.

This paper unravels micromechanical aspects of metallic materials whose microstructure comprises grains of two or more phases. The local plastic response is determined by (i) the relative misorientation of the slip systems of individual grains, and (ii) the different mechanical properties of the phases. The relative importance of these two mechanisms at the meso-scale is unclear: is the plastic response dominated by the grain’s anisotropy, or is this effect overwhelmed by the mechanical contrast between the two phases? The answer impacts the modeling of such a material at the meso-scale, but also gives insights in the resulting fracture mechanisms at that length-scale. Until now, this question has been addressed only for particular crystallographies and mechanical properties. In contrast, this paper studies the issue systematically using a large set of phase distributions, crystallographies, and material parameters. It is found that the macroscopic and the mesoscopic (grain-averaged) plastic response of the two extreme modeling choices (crystal plasticity or isotropic plasticity) converge with increasing phase contrast. The effect of the crystallography is completely overwhelmed by the phase contrast when the yield stress of the hard phase is a factor of four higher compared to the soft phase. When this ratio is lower than two, its influence may not be neglected. However, even in this regime, fracture initiation is controlled by the local arrangement of the phases. The latter is quantified in this paper through the average arrangement of the phases around fracture initiation sites.