Font Size: 

The fracture properties of spheroidised steel, especially the cleavage properties
are well known to be related to the carbides damage. Carbides damage has been
studied for a long time considering the pile-up of the dislocations against carbide,
or from a macroscopic viewpoint, considering the ferrite as an homogeneous
isotropic material. In this work the ferrite is modeled at the crystalline level.
The microstructure generation is performed through a finite element method: a
crystalline model is used for the grains behavior modeled by hexagons or Voronoï
Tesselation. The carbides are modeled in the form of spherical particles and are
randomly located within the ferrite grains. The stress distribution in the carbides
is studied considering the different random crystalline orientation of the grains.
The effect of the carbide size relative to the grain size, and the influence of the
grains morphology on the carbide loading are presented as well.