Mechanical behaviour of TWIP steel under shear loading

Twinning induced plasticity steels (TWIP) are very good candidate for automotive industry applications because they potentially offer large energy absorption before failure due to their exceptional strain hardening capability and high strength. However, their behaviour is drastically influenced by the loading conditions. In this work, the mechanical behaviour of a TWIP steel sheet sample was investigated at room temperature under monotonic and reverse simple shear loading. It was shown that all the expected features of load reversal such as Bauschinger effect, transient strain hardening with high rate and permanent softening, depend on the prestrain level. This is in agreement with the fact that these effects, which occur during reloading, are related to the rearrangement of the dislocation structure induced during the predeformation. The homogeneous anisotropic hardening (HAH) approach proposed by Barlat et al. (2011) [1] was successfully employed to predict the experimental results.