Abstract
Boron steel, classed as an ultra high-strength steel (UHSS), has been utilized in anti-intrusion systems in automobiles, providing high strength and weight-saving potential through gage reduction. UHSS spot welds exhibit unique hardness distributions, with a hard nugget and outlying base material, but with a soft heat-affected zone in-between these regions. This soft zone reduces the strength of the weld and makes it susceptible to failure. Due to the interaction of various weld zones that occurs during loading, there is a need to characterize the loading response of the weld for accurate failure predictions. The loading response of certain weld zones, as well as failure loci, was obtained through physical simulation of the welding process. The results showed a significant difference in mechanical behavior through the weld length. An important result is that instrumented indentation was shown to be a valid, quantitative method for verifying the accuracy with which weld microstructure has been recreated with regard to the target weld microstructure.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1536–1551 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A: Physical Metallurgy and Materials Science |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Early online date | 12 Feb 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2018 |
Bibliographical note
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Mechanics of Materials
- Metals and Alloys