Abstract
The automotive industry has an ongoing request for lighter, stiffer and at the same time cheaper parts to maintain the economic and technical progress. Especially in case of safety relevant components a combination of high stiffness and sufficient ductility is required. Regarding these demands the main subject of this project was to improve the mechanical properties of forging steel alloys by employing a high-strength and ductile bainitic microstructure while maintaining a cost effective process chain for the high-stressed forged parts. For these purposes a new steel alloy with an optimized process chain has been developed. To reduce the experimental effort for identifying the process parameters and geometries that enable the target microstructure a numerical approach was developed to predict the microstructure of the steel alloy after the process chain. The implemented numerical approach is based on FEM simulations of the forging and cooling combined with deformation-cooling-time-temperature-transformation diagrams.