Mechanical behavior of ferritic grade 3Cr12 stainless steel-Part 1: Experimental investigations.

Ferritic stainless steels are corrosion resistant steels with a low and stable cost. Widely used in automotive applications, structural applications using ferritic stainless steels are only emerging mainly because ferritics are partially covered by structural standards due to a shortage of design data. Computer models are more and more used to support the developments of conventional design methods based on expensive full-scale tests or trial and errors methods. And for the modeling of metal forming processes as well as structural behavior of members, it is necessary to afford an accurate knowledge of the mechanical properties. In this paper, the experimental investigations made on the chromium based alloy 3Cr12 (1.4003) in order to characterize its mechanical behavior are presented. During the research, a classical uniaxial experimental equipment and a bi-axial experimental equipment designed by Flores (2005) in the Structures Laboratory of the University of Lige have been used. The collection of tests performed included tensile tests, cyclic shear tests, simple shear tests and successive simple shear and plane-strain tests. The yield locus and the hardening models are presented and identified in a companion paper by the same author.