Are you an engineer who wants to contribute to sustainability, reducing carbon emissions, and materials recycling? We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic PhD candidate to work on a challenging micro-mechanical modelling project, in an exciting multidisciplinary team.

Information
The transition to low-carbon steelmaking will significantly alter production chains, starting from raw materials to high-end products made from these steels. One of the paths to reduce CO2 emissions in steelmaking is the use of scrap. This will inevitably entail significant variations in the chemical composition of the steel produced, which may affect the performance of the steels during processing and service. This is particularly true for stainless steels undergoing phase transformations in view of the targeted mechanical properties.

These phase transformations occur during the metal forming processes in which they are shaped to a product. These need to be well controlled to safeguard the formability of the material during processing on the one hand and securing the resulting strength and hardness properties on the other hand. This makes this class of materials particularly vulnerable to the use of recycled material, with possibly uncontrolled or variable content. Accordingly, this research project aims to establish predictive insights between microstructures contaminated with tramp elements and the resulting engineering properties as required for product processing.

Vacancy for a modelling-oriented PhD student on the Constitutive behaviour of recycled metastable stainless steel
This project will focus on a model-based approach, taking experimental input from the partners involved, to assess the influence of scrap-induced changes and contaminations on the performance of stainless steels that are subjected to phase transformations in the production chain. This approach will enable a qualitative and semi-quantitative assessment of the influence of the presence of various elements (and second-phase particles) on stainless steel properties. This step is essential for the introduction of green steels in the market segment exploiting such steels.

This work will consist of the following tasks:

• Extensive literature review on the multi-scale model for strain-induced phase transformation of stainless steels and the influence of tramp elements and contaminations on the microstructure and mechanical behaviour of stainless steels.
• Develop a multi-scale framework for strain-induced martensitic phase transformations applicable to austenitic metastable steels.
• Incorporation of the phase transformation model in a representative volume element (RVE), incorporating crystal plasticity at the meso-scale level.
• Homogenization of the RVE response for exploitation at the macroscopic level
• Model extension to account for the presence of contaminations through either solid solution elements, precipitates or second-phase particles.
• Validation of the macroscopic thermo-mechanical properties.

Section Mechanics of Materials
You will work in the section of Mechanics of Materials (MoM) (www.tue.nl/mechmat) at the department of Mechanical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The MoM section is recognized worldwide for its high-level research on experimental analysis, theoretical understanding and predictive modelling of complex mechanical behavior in engineering materials at different length scales (e.g, plasticity, damage, fracture), which emerges from the physics and mechanics of the underlying multi-phase microstructure. An integrated numerical-experimental approach is generally adopted for this goal. A state-of-the-art computing infrastructure is in place for the numerical work in this project.