A Cyclic Plasticity Model with Martensite Transformation for S30408 and Its Finite Element Implementation

The ability of the constitutive model to simulate the ratcheting behavior of metastable austenitic stainless steel S30408 is significant to ensure the safety of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) semi-trailer tanks in the lightweight process of the inner containers. This is because the lightweight inner vessels often encounter cyclic stresses due to the road inertia loads together with high mean stresses due to internal pressures. In this study, we performed cryogenic uniaxial tension experiments and a series of ratcheting experiments to investigate the cyclic plasticity behavior of the metastable austenitic stainless steel S30408. Based on the Ohno-Wang II model, we proposed a new cyclic plasticity constitutive model with martensitic transformation, which relates the content of deformation-induced martensite with isotropic hardening and kinematic hardening. The ratcheting behaviors of S30408 were first simulated by the proposed model with the incremental loading method using MATLAB. The results showed that the model could reasonably predict the ratcheting behavior of S30408, and the evolution law of martensite content could well predict the content of deformation-induced martensite. Under the assumption of the von Mises yield criterion and normal plasticity flow rule, we developed a numerical algorithm of plastic strain with the proposed model to implement the finite element calculation of the model. Internal iteration in the numerical algorithm was implemented with the Euler backward method, which calculated the trial strain for each equilibrium iteration using the consistent tangent matrix. With a user subroutine, the proposed model was programmed into ANSYS for a user - executable version. By simulating the uniaxial ratcheting of a S30408 round bar, we found that the calculated results were in good agreement with the experimental results, which promises further applications in the design of structures, such as LNG semi-trailer tanks.