Performance of cast iron under thermal loading: effect of graphite morphology

Cast iron is an important engineering material, used extensively in industrial applications. Despite being often exposed to complex thermomechanical loading, its performance under such conditions is not fully identified because of its complex microstructure. In this work, a response of cast iron to pure thermal loading is studied employing a micromechanical approach. Specifically, 2D representative volume elements (RVEs) are generated employing material characterisation data and analysed using a finiteelement approach. These RVEs comprise a ferritic matrix enveloping a single graphite particle, represented as an ellipse. The developed numerical strategy allows a parametric analysis of the effects of graphite morphology and boundary conditions applied. In addition, a model with a graphite particle modelled as a void is investigated to study the accuracy of the obtained results for the thermal load. The obtained results are expected to be useful in the future design of this engineering alloy.