Abstract
Measurements of temperature variation and residual stress during and after laser-quenching operation are difficult due to too small area of the referred region and too short time of the operation. This motivates the importance of the numerical simulation treated in this paper. The CAE system “HEARTS” developed based on the metallo-thermo-mechanics, the validity and accuracy of which had already been confirmed elsewhere, is applied to the simulation of the quenching process of a carbon steel (S45C) by pulsed YAG laser beam in order to evaluate the coupled fields of phase transformation, temperature and stress. The results of the simulated stress distribution seem to represent the practical mode of shear stress on the quenched boundary, and the shape of the martensite transformed region is compared with the observed micrograph.
