Examination of Bending Stress Superposition Effect on Martensite Transformation in Austenitic Stainless Steel 304

Uniaxial tension is a universal material characterization experiment. However, studies have shown that increased formability can be achieved with simultaneous bending and unbending of the material. This so-called continuous bending under tension process is an example of bending stress superposition to a uniaxial tension process. In this research, experiments are conducted on stainless steel 304 to investigate the effects of bending stress superposition on the austenite to martensite phase transformation. Two vortex tubes are mounted to the carriage of the machine and used to decrease the temperature in a localized region of the specimen to evaluate two temperature conditions. The in-situ strain and temperature fields are captured using 3D digital image correlation and infrared cameras. The deformation induced $$\upalpha^{\prime}$$ -martensite volume fraction is measured at regular intervals along the deformed gauge length using a Feritscope. The number of cycles that the rollers traverse the gauge length, corresponding to the strain level, is also varied to create five conditions. The deformed specimens revealed heterogeneous martensite transformation along the gauge length due to the non-uniform temperature fields observed for each test condition. Decreasing the temperature and increasing the number of cycles led to the highest amount of phase transformation for this bending-tension superposed process. These results provide insight on how stress superposition can be applied to vary the phase transformation in more complex manufacturing processes, such as incremental forming, which combines bending, tension, and shear deformation.