Materials Science Forum, Vol.500-501, 655-662, 2005
Characterization of the residual stresses in plastically deformed ferrite-martensite steels using Barkhausen noise measurements
In this work, we show that the measurement of the Barkhausen noise allows the residual stresses in each of the two phases of ferrite-martensite steels to be characterized. We have first studied the effect of a tensile and a compressive stress on the Barkhausen noise signature. We observed that for a ferrite-martensite steel, the application of a tensile stress increases the Barkhausen activity of the martensite and ferrite phases, whereas a compressive one reduces it. In a second time, we induced residual stresses by applying a plastic deformation to ferrite-martensite steels. After a tensile plastic deformation, we observed that (i) compressive residual stresses appear in ferrite, and (ii) tensile residual stresses appear in martensite. An opposite behavior is observed after a compressive plastic deformation. These results show that the Barkhausen noise measurement makes it possible to highlight in a nondestructive way the distribution of the stresses in each of the two phases of a ferrite-martensite steel. This result could be used to characterize industrial Dual-Phases steels that are plastically deformed during mechanical processes.