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The majority of highly stressed steel components are manufactured through hot forming due to the increase in strength and toughness resulting from the fine-grained microstructure. Thereby, the alloying element manganese is added to further increase the material strength and hardness. Also, sulfur is added in order to ensure an improved machinability in the post-machining steps. However, despite their individual benefits, manganese and sulfur tend to form non-metallic inclusions consisting of manganese sulfide (MnS) at high temperatures present during hot forming. These inclusions act as mechanical weak points in the steel matrix and can lead to an early failure of components. In order to accurately model the hot forming process by taking this into account and to predict the final properties of the component, a detailed numerical description of the behaviour of the steel matrix as well as the MnS-inclusions is required. Therefore, the focus of this paper lies in the characterisation of the flow behaviour of two commonly used steel alloys containing varying contents of manganese and sulfur, 1.7139 (16MnCrS5) and 1.1303 (38MnVS6). Cylinder compression tests are conducted at different strain rates as well as temperatures typical for hot forming to determine the resulting flow curves, which are then used to parameterise a flow curve model according to the approach of Hensel-Spittel. For this, a mesh study is conducted first, and the resulting force-displacement curves are compared to the experimental data. The models are validated using numerical simulations based on the finite element method (FEM) to recreate the force-displacement curve of the cylinder compression tests.
Keywords: Manganese steel, cylinder compression test, flow curves, finite element method© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.