The Significance of Spatial Length Scales and Solute Segregation in Strengthening Rapid Solidification Microstructures of 316L Stainless Steel

Selective laser melting (SLM) is a novel manufacturing technique for producing complex parts, with unique mechanical properties that result from rapidly solidified structures. For SLM of austenitic 316L stainless steel, the reported mechanical properties have a large scatter, which reflects an incomplete understanding and control of the process-structure-properties linkage. This paper demonstrates how material micromechanical behavior --- including length scale dependent yield strength and hardening --- is linked to rapid solidification microstructure, and how this structure emerges from typical SLM process conditions. This linkage is produced by concurrently coupling phase field simulations with crystal plasticity modeling. In particular, the evolution of rapidly solidified SLM microstructures is described with a quantitative phase field model with imposed solute trapping kinetics. A range of process conditions are considered by varying the thermal gradient and pulling speed driving solidification. The phase field model can predict morphological transitions (dendritic-cellular-planar), microsegregation, and emergent microstructure length scales, as function of process conditions. Both 2D and 3D phase field simulations are conducted, yielding microstructure morphologies and cell spacing Vs. cooling rate data that are in good agreement with the available experiments in the literature. Micromechanical response of domains characterized by cellular subgrain solidification structures, generated from phase simulations, are analyzed with a Cosserat crystal plasticity model which includes calibrated length-scale and hardening effects, and a realistic description of solid solution strengthening. It is shown that length scale characteristics (cell spacing and grain size) and solute segregation greatly influence the overall hardening behavior, and also affect plastic localization and evolution of geometrically necessary dislocation (GND) type hardening. We conclude with a study of the micromechanical behavior of a polycrystalline structure, focusing on the effects of cell spacing and grain size, and the relative orientation between crystalline lattices and cells. Our results suggest that the material strength is more sensitive to the cell spacing (microstructural length scale) than to the magnitude of solute segregation. The concurrently coupled phase field-crystal plasticity modeling scheme is presented as a proof-of-concept for systematically investigating and discovering new compositions, processes and microstructures for additive manufacturing of metals.