High performance sheet metals with a multi-phase microstructure suffer from deformation induced damage formation during forming in the constituent phases but importantly also where these intersect. To capture damage in terms of the physical processes in three dimensions (3D) and its stochastic nature during deformation, two challenges remain to be tackled: First, bridging high resolution analysis towards large scales to consider statistical data and, second, characterising in 3D with a resolution appropriate for sub-micron sized voids at a large scale. Here, we present how this can be achieved using panoramic scanning electron microscopy (SEM), metallographic serial sectioning, and deep-learning assisted automatic image analysis. This brings together the 3D evolution of active damage mechanisms with volumetric and environmental information for thousands of individual damage sites. We also assess potential surface preparation artefacts in 2D analyses. Overall, we find that for the material considered here, a dual phase (DP800) steel, martensite cracking is the dominant but not sole origin of deformation induced damage and that for a quantitative comparison of damage density, metallographic preparation can induce additional surface damage density far exceeding what is commonly induced between uniaxial straining steps.

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through projects B2 and T02 of the Collaborative Research Center TRR 188 (project ID 278868966). This work is also funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the NHR Program. Calculations were performed with computing resources granted by RWTH Aachen University under project rwth0535. We further thank Dr. Ing. Carl Kusche for providing the SEM image of the cross-sectioned sample.