Investigation of Transformation Induced Plasticity and Residual Stress Analysis in Stainless Steel Welds

The aim of this paper is to investigate the implications for weld residual stresses of martensitic transformation induced plasticity (TRIP) in stainless steel filler metal. The TRIP strains occurring during cooling under different uniaxial load levels have been obtained using digital image correlation (DIC) for a residual stress relieving low transformation temperature weld filler known to show little variant selection on cooling as a function of stress. In order to investigate the efficacy of current FE transformation plasticity models of different levels of sophistication in simulating TRIP strains, a finite element model, incorporating the so-called Greenwood-Johnson effect was used to simulate these constrained dilatometry measurements. To assess the implications of the different approaches to modelling TRIP for weld residual stresses, the TRIP coefficients determined from the above experiments were incorporated into an FE model simulating the residual stresses that are generated when a single weld bead is deposited on to a stainless steel base plate. It was found that including TRIP had a significant influence on the weld stresses, while the differences between the models were much smaller.