Speaker
Description
Industrial thermomechanical treatments of metallic components consist of several steps of plastic deformation, either followed or alternated with heat treatments. The workpiece, regardless of its initial shape and microstructure, undergoes heterogeneous plastic deformation and temperature distribution during thermal and forming processes. These conditions drive microstructural changes such as strengthening, recovery, recrystallisation, allotropic phase transformation, and phase globularisation. Over recent years, we have developed a mean-field model that predicts microstructural changes and mechanical behaviour during thermomechanical processing and heat treatments. The model accounts for alloy diversity and microstructure evolution in workpieces under non-isothermal, non-isochronous conditions. Our approach incorporates time continuity, showing that properties and microstructure depend on both state variables and the processing path. When integrated into finite element simulations, the model can handle complex shapes with varying temperatures and deformations, predicting heterogeneous microstructural evolution driven by local thermomechanical histories—including temperature, strain, and strain rate. In this work, we introduce a lower-cost computational solution for processing design using physically informed processing maps. These maps enable us to determine microstructures and mechanical responses, thereby helping identify optimal processing conditions for specific local scenarios. For this study, we use examples of near-beta titanium alloys (Ti-Mo and Ti17) and 6082 aluminium alloy, validating the results through compression tests on a Gleeble® 3800 across a wide range of deformation and annealing conditions to obtain the mechanical response. Microstructural information is obtained using scanning electron microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction. The maps can depict both isothermal and non-isothermal conditions; strain rate and temperature rate profiles can be nonlinear; and variations in the initial microstructure are accounted for.