Dual-phase (DP) steel is the flagship of advanced high-strength steels, which were the first among various candidate alloy systems to find application in weight-reduced automotive components. On the one hand, this is a metallurgical success story: Lean alloying and simple thermomechanical treatment enable use of less material to accomplish more performance while complying with demanding environmental and economic constraints. On the other hand, the enormous literature on DP steels demonstrates the immense complexity of microstructure physics in multiphase alloys: Roughly 50 years after the first reports on ferrite-martensite steels, there are still various open scientific questions. Fortunately, the last decades witnessed enormous advances in the development of enabling experimental and simulation techniques, significantly improving the understanding of DP steels. This review provides a detailed account of these improvements, focusing specifically on (a) microstructure evolution during processing, (b) experimental characterization of micromechanical behavior, and (c) the simulation of mechanical behavior, to highlight the critical unresolved issues and to guide future research efforts.

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a b s t r a c tFerritic-martensitic dual phase (DP) steels deform spatially in a highly heterogeneous manner, i.e. with strong strain and stress partitioning at the micro-scale. Such heterogeneity in local strain evolution leads in turn to a spatially heterogeneous damage distribution, and thus, plays an important role in the process of damage inheritance and fracture. To understand and improve DP steels, it is important to identify connections between the observed strain and damage heterogeneity and the underlying microstructural parameters, e.g. ferrite grain size, martensite distribution, martensite fraction, etc. In this work we pursue this aim by conducting in-situ deformation experiments on two different DP steel grades, employing two different microscopic-digital image correlation (lDIC) techniques to achieve microstructural strain maps of representative statistics and high-resolution. The resulting local strain maps are analyzed in connection to the observed damage incidents (identified by image post-processing) and to local stress maps (obtained from crystal plasticity (CP) simulations of the same microstructural area). The results reveal that plasticity is typically initiated within ''hot zones'' with larger ferritic grains and lower local martensite fraction. With increasing global deformation, damage incidents are most often observed in the boundary of such highly plastified zones. High-resolution lDIC and the corresponding CP simulations reveal the importance of martensite dispersion: zones with bulky martensite are more susceptible to macroscopic localization before the full strain hardening capacity of the material is consumed. Overall, the presented joint analysis establishes an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) approach for designing advanced DP steels.

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