Thermomechanical effects during impact testing of WC/Co composite material

Abstract WC/Co metal-matrix ceramic composites (MMCs) are used for manufacturing cutting and drilling tools, surgical tools, mill inserts, jet engines, and other high-responsibility structures. The combination of a phase of hard wolfram carbide (WC) grains with a metallic ductile interface of cobalt (Co) yields a complex microstructure with significantly different mechanical properties of the phases. The aim of this study is to investigate the thermomechanical behavior of the MMC polycrystalline material with ductile binders under impact conditions. An adiabatic and coupled thermomechanical analysis of the WC/Co composite under impact loading is performed using FEM. The heat conduction is considered in the analysis in order to capture heat transfer in the polycrystalline structure, i.e. between the grains and the grain boundaries (GBs). The Johnson-Cook yield function is used in the constitutive model of the ductile Co interface, while the WC phase is linear elastic. The motivation comes from the observation that the heat conductivity effect is often omitted, even in recent papers **[75]. Significant differences between temperatures and plastic strains in the adiabatic and coupled solutions are observed, which leads to the main conclusion that the adiabatic solution should not be used for assessing the impact response of the composite material.