We revisit recent findings on experimental and modeling investigations of bainitic transformations under the influence of external stresses and pre-strain during the press hardening process. Experimentally, the transformation kinetics in 22MnB5 under various tensile stresses are studied both on the macroscopic and microstructural level. In the bainitic microstructure, the variant selection effect is analyzed with an optimized prior-austenite grain reconstruction technique. The resulting observations are expressed phenomenologically using a autocatalytic transformation model, which serves for further scale bridging descriptions of the underlying thermo-chemo-mechanical coupling processes during the bainitic transformation. Using analyses of orientation relationships, thermodynamically consistent and nondiagonal phase field models are developed, which are supported by ab initio generated mechanical parameters. Applications are related to the microstructure evolution on the sheaf, subunit, precipitate and grain boundary level.
Keywords: bainite; phase field; press hardening.