Constitutive material model for steel powder compaction using multi-scale approach

Multi-scale approach enables prediction of the constitutive behaviour of heterogeneous and/or anisotropic materials base on Representative Volume Element (RVE) investigation. Such approach is nowadays used in simulations concerning polymers, rubbers, organic materials, etc, therefore, it was done an attempt to use it in powder metallurgy process like uniaxial compaction. For a test were chosen 3 different powder mixtures produced in industrial conditions with very similar chemical composition, but with different particle size distributions. Particle size distribution parameter was chosen, because nowadays used material models have some difficulties to apply such information, mostly because of using empirical factors. Moreover, our RVE material models were evaluated with experimental data by comparison of critical parameters like compaction force for cylindrical shape component. The constitutive material model finds very good correlation with the experimental data within 0.1%.