Analysis of residual stresses generated by progressive induction hardeningof steel cylinders

The internal stresses generated during quenching can produce warping and ev en cracking of a steel body and, therefore, the prediction of such stresses is an important task. Phenomenological aspects of quenching involve coupli ngs between different physical processes occurring in the phenomena. The pr esent contribution is concerned with modelling and simulation of quenching, presenting an anisothermal model formulated within the framework of contin uum mechanics and the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. A numerical procedure is developed based on an operator split technique associated wit h an iterative numerical scheme in order to deal with non-linearities in th e formulation. With this assumption, the coupled governing equations are so lved involving four uncoupled problems: thermal, phase transformation, ther moelastic and elastoplastic behaviours. The proposed general formulation is applied to analyse progressive induction hardening of steel cylinders. Num erical results suggest that the proposed model is capable of capturing the main behaviour observed in experimental data.