5th International High Manganese Steel Conference - HMNS 2022

The development of new advanced high-strength steels is traditionally a very tedious process, involving extensive experimental investigations by which composition and processing conditions are varied in a more or less erratic manner until the desired properties are achieved. This situation has a tremendous negative impact on alloy development time and costs. The Alloyneering alloy design approach encompasses the application of computational alloy thermodynamics, kinetics, and constitutive models, which can describe the microstructure evolution and link strength with microstructure, for the computational design of metallic alloys with tailored microstructure and properties. The procedure is integrated with optimization techniques for the selection of optimal alloy composition or processing parameters. An example illustrating the alloyneering approach is the design of Medium-Mn steels (MMnS) with tuned retained austenite stability for optimum TRIP-TWIP interactions which lead to enhanced strength/formability combinations. CALPHAD based thermodynamic and kinetic calculations, coupled with evolutionary and gradient based robust optimization techniques, enabled the design of optimal compositions and processing parameters that satisfy certain design criteria under the uncertainty found upon material production. Constitutive and transformation kinetics modeling of stress-assisted and strain-induced ε-Martensite, α΄-Martensite as well as mechanical twinning in a physical framework, followed to determine the mechanical behavior and the evolution of TRIP & TWIP upon loading. This example illustrates that the alloyneering approach could be used for the development of new advanced high-strength steels.