Residual stresses in quenched seamless steel tubes highly depend on the cooling conditions to which the tubes have been subjected. The design aspect of how to use controlled cooling strategies in multiphase steel tubes to achieve certain residual stress and phase configurations is discussed. In an experimentally validated finite element (FE) model considering a coupled evolution of martensite and bainite, three cooling strategies are tested for a low-alloyed 0.25 wt.% C steel tube. The strategies are (i) external cooling only, (ii) internal and external cooling for low residual stresses in a mainly martensitic tube, and (iii) internal and external cooling with low cooling rate for a mainly bainitic tube. The strategies represent design cases, where low residual stresses with different phase compositions are provoked, in order to show the potential of numerical analysis for residual stress and property design. It can be concluded that, for the investigated steel class, intense external cooling leads to a characteristic residual stress profile regardless of the dimension. A combination of external and internal cooling allows a more flexible design of residual stress and phase distribution by choosing different cooling parameters (i.e., water amount and cooling times). In general, lower cooling rates lead to lower thermal misfit strains, and thus less plasticity and lower residual stresses.
Keywords: XRD measurements; design; low-alloyed steel; phase transformation; residual stress; simulation.