Effect of strain rate on bake hardening response of BH220 steel

This study aims at understanding the bake hardening ability of ultra low carbon BH220 steel at different strain rates. The as-received material has been pre-strained to four different levels and then deformed in tension under (a) as pre-strained state and (b) after baking at 170 ∘C for 20 minutes, at three different strain rates of 0.001, 0.1 and 100/s. In both the conditions, yield stress increased with pre-strain and strain rate, but bake hardening ability was found to decrease when strain rate was increased. The strain rate sensitivity of the material was also found to decrease with bake hardening. Generation of dislocation forests and their subsequent immobility during baking treatment enables them to act as long range obstacles during further deformation. At higher strain rates, less amount of dislocations are produced which can interact with themselves and produce hardening, because of which bake hardening ability and the strain rate drops. A dislocation based strengthening model, as proposed by Larour et al. 2011 [7], was used to predict the yield stress values obtained at different conditions. The equation produced excellent co-relation with the experimental data