Metal parts distortions during gas quenching

The main aim of this work was to develop a reliable procedure to simulate the quenching process of a shaft made of the 16MnCr5 steel by means of the commercial finite element software package ANSYS®. Unfortunately, this software does not provide advanced multiphase material models necessary to solve the problem completely. Thus, changes in the steel microstructure were simplified significantly, although they are very important. The computations were performed in two steps. At first, the temperature distribution was determined as a function of geometry and time. Then, the mechanical response to temperature changes was simulated. All of this was done in a single integrated CAE environment, ANSYS® Workbench.