Creep deformation modeling of a tool steel with a tempered martensitic structure used for extrusion dies

Aim of an extrusion die is to allow the production of the profile with the required dimension tolerances and quality level. One of the main impediment to achieve this aim could be an excessive die deformation due to the high cyclic loads and temperatures acting on the die during the extrusion process. In order to investigate the mechanisms that influence the die deformation, a physical experiment reproducing the thermo-mechanical conditions of a die was performed on a martensitic tool steel used for extrusion tools (AISI H11). The design of experiment consisted of 4 levels of temperature, 3 levels of stress and 3 types of load, i.e. pure creep, pure fatigue and creep-fatigue. In all cases, the same pattern of the mandrel displacement-time curve was found consisting of 3 stages as those typical of the strain evolution in a standard creep test with a marked primary phase. Thus, with the aim to define an easy-applicable equation to estimate the die deformation, the time hardening creep law was chosen. In order to obtain the temperature gradient within the specimen coupled thermo-electric simulations were previously performed. The nodal temperature have been then imported within the structural model and the mechanical properties assigned to the each element as a function of these values. Coefficients of the time-hardening law were optimized, for each testing condition, on the basis of experimental data starting from values for similar alloys found in literature. The values found were validated against additional experimental data performed with different specimen geometries. A good average agreement was found between experimental and numerical results.