MODELING ANNEALED GRAIN STRUCTURES OF SOME CARBON STEELS

USING VORONOI TESSELATION

^1*Oluwole, O.O, and ²Akinkunmi, A. L

¹Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria

²Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife

e-mail:oluwoleo2@asme.org

ABSTRACT

Modeled grain structures of annealed carbon steels using voronoi tessellation is reported in this work. Three stages of programming were used in modeling the microstructures. The first stage was iteration of the voronoi cells in order to obtain equivalent grain size with experimental specimens. In the second stage, the pearlite phase was introduced using the lever rule represented by a plot of random points. The third layer was modeled to reveal the grain boundaries of the carbon steels. The values of the grain sizes of modeled microstructures showed good agreement with experimental values.The study has shown that the microstructures can be modeled fairly accurately thus enabling a fairly quick export of geometric models on to some other finite element packages for analysis of stress – strain  effect on  microstructure and generally a stress-microstructure response could be determined.

Keywords: microstructure -modeling, voronoi tessellation, and carbon steels