DYNAMIC PROPERTIES FOR MODELING AND SIMULATION OF MACHINING: EFFECT OF PEARLITE TO AUSTENITE PHASE TRANSITION ON FLOW STRESS IN AISI 1075 STEEL

The Pulse-Heated Kolsky Bar Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been developed for the measurement of dynamic properties of metals. With this system, a small sample can be pre-heated from room temperature to several hundred degrees C in less than a second, prior to rapid loading in compression at strain rates up to the order of 104 per second. A major focus of this research program has been on investigating the influence of the heating rate and time at temperature on the flow stress of carbon steels, for application to the modeling and simulation of high-speed machining operations. The unique pulse heating capability of the NIST Kolsky bar system enables flow stress measurements to be obtained under conditions that differ significantly from those in which the test specimens have been pre-heated to a high temperature more slowly, because there is less time for thermally activated microstructural processes such as dislocation annealing, grain growth, and solid state phase transformations to take place. New experimental results are presented on AISI 1075 pearlitic steel samples that were pulse-heated up to and beyond the austenite formation temperature of the material (723 degrees C). The data show that the flow stress decreased by about 50% due to a phase transformation in the microstructure of the material from the stronger pearlitic phase to the weaker austenitic phase. As a result, the constitutive response behavior of the material cannot be modeled by a fixed-parameter constitutive model, like the Johnson-Cook flow stress model that is widely used in computer simulations of high-speed machining processes.