Automatic 3-D simulation and micro-stress distribution of polycrystalline metallic materials Original Research Article

This paper proposes an automatic method to simulate the microstructure of metallic materials and investigates the micro-stress distribution inside the materials. A polycrystalline material is modeled as an ensemble of grains. The response of the polycrystal is the aggregate response of the constituent grains. A software has been developed by combining a tessellation method and the MSC PATRAN/NASTRAN finite element analysis software, and it has the advantage of predicting micro-stress of each grain and their correlation. The shortest distance criterion has been used in the 3-D tessellation software program to determine the grain faces. This information is used with PATRAN to create a 3-D microstructure of a statistical volume element (SVE) with 200 grains. In the SVE model, each grain is assumed to have anisotropic mechanical properties with different orientations. Stress analysis of both single phase and multi-phase alloys are performed using the SVE model, and the statistical micro-stress distribution results show good congruence with this SVE model.