COMSOL Multiphysics^® 5.6 Release Highlights

Metal Processing Module Updates

For users of the Metal Processing Module, COMSOL Multiphysics^® version 5.6 brings a physics interface for carburization, import functionality for material properties, and enhanced capabilities for modeling phase transformations. Read more about these Metal Processing Module updates below.

New Carburization Physics Interface

The new Carburization physics interface can be used to study the effect of carburization. With this interface, you can, for example, prescribe a boost-diffuse carburizing cycle, and then model the carbon exchange with the surroundings using convective mass transfer.

The Carburization physics interface and the Settings window of the Carburization node in the model tree.

Results from a carburization analysis, where the carbon concentration is shown inside a gear segment.

Importing Material Properties for Steel Quenching Simulations

The material properties of metallurgical phases, such as austenite and pearlite, will depend on temperature and plastic strain, among other factors. The effort involved in obtaining material properties for the different metallurgical phases can be significant, and as an option, users of the Metal Processing Module can now import material properties from the software JMatPro^®. The material properties that can be imported per metallurgical phase include:

• Elastic
• Plastic (initial yield stress and hardening curve)
• Thermal expansion
• Density
• Specific heat
• Thermal conductivity

Enhanced Capabilities for Modeling Metallurgical Phase Transformations

The Metal Phase Transformation and Austenite Decomposition physics interfaces are now available in 0D. In a situation where you are calibrating phase transformation models to experimental data such as CCT or TTT diagrams, a geometry is not needed. To facilitate the calibration of phase transformation models using transformation diagram data, you can store transformation time and temperature pairs during the analysis. You can see how transformation times are used in the Calibration Against TTT Data model.

Calibrate phase transformation models in 0D, as seen here for pearlite.

Additionally, in situations where you know that a certain phase transformation is only active across a certain temperature range, this can now be modeled by setting upper and lower limits on the temperature. For more general conditions, the Transformation Condition feature can be added as an attribute to the Phase Transformation feature.

New Tutorial Model

COMSOL Multiphysics^® version 5.6 brings one new tutorial model to the Metal Processing Module.

Calibration Against TTT Data

Result from the calibration of a phase transformation model to TTT data.

Application Library Title:
calibration_against_ttt_data
Download from the Application Gallery