Construction of Representative Volume Element for Fe Simulation of Bulk Deformation of Stainless Steel Using X-Ray Computed Tomography Approach

In this paper, a representative volume element (RVE)-based multiscale approach was proposed to evaluate the bulk deformation of a special casted stainless steel (SS316L). The microgeometry of the casted SS316L specimen was obtained by a non-destructive X-ray computed tomography (CT) system. The geometrical RVE models were constructed based on the size, spatial distribution and volume fraction of micro-voids from the processed CT images. Commercial finite element (FE) package ABAQUS was employed to simulate the compressive deformation of RVE models. Since the inhomogeneity of the RVE was taken into account in the entire specimen, micro-voids inside the specimen were replaced by matching RVE models and the predicted flow stress data of the specimen were compared with the experimental results and hence the proposed RVE-based multiscale method has been verified.