Modeling the Hydrogen Effect on the Constitutive Response of a Low Carbon Steel in Cyclic Loading

Hydrogen-accelerated fatigue crack growth is a most severe manifestation of hydrogen embrittlement. A mechanistic and predictive model is still lacking partly due to the lack of a descriptive constitutive model of the hydrogen/material interaction at the macroscale under cyclic loading. Such a model could be used to assess the nature of the stress and strain fields in the neighborhood of a crack, a development that could potentially lead to the association of these fields with proper macroscopic parameters. Toward this goal, a constitutive model for cyclic response should be capable of capturing hardening or softening under cyclic straining or ratcheting under stress-controlled testing. In this work, we attempt a constitutive description by using data from uniaxial strain-controlled cyclic loading and stress-controlled ratcheting tests with a low carbon steel, Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) SM490YB, conducted in air and 1 MPa H₂ gas environment at room temperature. We explore the Chaboche constitutive model which is a nonlinear kinematic hardening model that was developed as an extension to the Frederick and Armstrong model, and propose an approach to calibrate the parameters involved. From the combined experimental data and the calibrated Chaboche model, we may conclude that hydrogen decreases the yield stress and the amount of cyclic hardening. On the other hand, hydrogen increases ratcheting, the rate of cyclic hardening, and promotes stronger recovery.