Plastic behaviour of steel experimental investigation and modelling

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with the plastic behaviour of steel. It comprises an investigation with focus on biaxial tests and constitutive modelling. Tests were performed on one stainless steel grade in two different strength classes, C700 and C850, as well as one extra high strength structural steel grade. An earlier developed concept for biaxial testing of cross-shaped specimens was utilised. However, there was a demand for new specimen designs to enable testing of the extra high strength steel. A comprehensive test programme including an initial and one subsequent loading was carried out. This provides data for stress-strain curves in two steps as well as stress points describing initial and subsequent yield criteria. The Bauschinger effect was evident for all grades. Furthermore, the behaviour in subsequent loadings was found to be direction dependent and the transition from elastic to plastic state was observed as gradual. A constitutive model with the possibility of depicting the phenomenological observations from the tests was earlier developed at Steel Structures, LTU, and proposed for annealed stainless steels. Further, it is a two surface model utilising the concept of distortional hardening and it was applied to the steel grades tested in this work. The model was found to be applicable to the steels tested in this study as well and compared to simpler models the applied model clearly improves the agreement with experimental tests.