DAAD-PPP-Brazil

Thermomechanical processes of emerging metallic materials

Programmes for Project-Related Personal Exchange (PPP) with Brazil – PKZ: 57390937

This project ran in 2018 and 2019, and focused on the design of thermomechanical processes with high accuracy and reproducibility in emerging metallic products aiming material performance enhancements. We targeted iron, magnesium and titanium alloys. The capability of multiphase alloys to withstand external thermo-mechanical loads is determined by the mechanical and physical properties of the microstructural components, their thermal/mechanical stability and their geometrical arrangement. All these parameters may vary during production and service and, therefore, physical aspects such as nucleation and growth of phases, grain re-orientation, phase-specific internal thermal stresses, diffusion controlled morphological changes or bonding of interfaces must be considered to understand the thermo-mechanical behavior of the alloys. Furthermore, microstructural features influence the stress partition between phases, stress localization as well as possible damage nucleation and evolution. The sensitivity of the mechanical properties to microstructural changes in structural steels, magnesium and titanium alloys has been extensively studied and reported but new insights can be gained nowadays due to the advance of modern characterization methods that allow to observe the microstructure evolution in-situ and/or three-dimensionally at high resolution.

The main scientific goals were: To design thermomechanical processes for improvements on materials performance; to understand the governing parameters behind phase transformations in the different alloys; to correlate concurrent phenomena during thermomechanical process based on metastable solid-state phase transformations, precipitation and microstructure formation mechanisms; to provide reliable data for modeling through high accuracy and well-defined experiments.

Several exchanges between Brasil and the UdS took place leading to several per review publications.

• EESC-USP – São Carlos School of Engineering at University of São Paulo
• PUC Minas – Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais
• CIMATEC – Centro Universitário UNISENAI-BA (Campus SENAI CIMATEC)