Analysis of residual stresses generated by progressive induction hardening of steel cylinders

The internal stresses generated during quenching can produce warping and even cracking of a steel body and, therefore, the prediction of such stresses is an important task. Phenomenological aspects of quenching involve couplings between different physical processes occurring in the phenomena. The present contribution is concerned with modelling and simulation of quenching, presenting an anisothermal model formulated within the framework of continuum mechanics and the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. A numerical procedure is developed based on an operator split technique associated with an iterative numerical scheme in order to deal with non-linearities in the formulation. With this assumption, the coupled governing equations are solved involving four uncoupled problems: thermal, phase transformation, thermoelastic and elastoplastic behaviours. The proposed general formulation is applied to analyse progressive induction hardening of steel cylinders. Numerical results suggest that the proposed model is capable of capturing the main behaviour observed in experimental data.