Investigation of Yield Surfaces Evolution for Polycrystalline Aluminum after Pre-Cyclic Loading by Experiment and Crystal Plasticity Simulation

This study aims at introducing the back stress of anisotropic strain-hardening into the crystal plasticity theory and demonstrating the rationality of this crystal plasticity model to describe the evolution of the subsequent yield surface of polycrystalline aluminum at the mesoscopic scale under complex pre-cyclic loading paths. By using two different scale finite element models, namely a global finite element model (GFEM) as the same size of the thin-walled tube specimen used in the experiments and a 3D cubic polycrystalline aggregate representative volume element (RVE) model, the evolution of the subsequent yield surface for different unloading cases after 30 pre-cycles is further performed by experiments and numerical simulations within a crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) frame. Results show that the size and shape of the subsequent yield surfaces are extremely sensitive to the chosen offset strain and the pre-cyclic loading direction, which present pronounced anisotropic hardening through a translation and a distortion of the yield surface characterized by the obvious “sharp corner” in the pre-deformation direction and “flat” in the reverse direction by the definition of small offset strain, while the subsequent yield surface exhibits isotropic hardening reflected by the von Mises circle to be distorted into an ellipse by the definition of large offset strain. In addition, the heterogeneous properties of equivalent plastic strain increment are further discussed under different offset strain conditions. Modeling results from this study show that the heterogeneity of plastic deformation decreases as a law of fraction exponential function with the increasing offset strain. The above analysis indicates that anisotropic hardening of the yield surface is correlated with heterogeneous deformation caused by crystal microstructure and crystal slip. The crystal plasticity model based on the above microscopic mechanism can accurately capture the directional hardening features of the yield surface.

Subsequent Yield Behavior of Hexagonal Metal with Rolling Texture

The subsequent yield surface of a rolling textured polycrystalline hexagonal metal sheet is computed using homogenization-based crystal plasticity. Hexagonal metals, such as magnesium and titanium, generally shows poorer formability compared to than cubic metals. The subsequent yielding behavior of a polycrystalline metal strongly affects the formability. The abrupt strain path change method is used to evaluate the direction of plastic flow, allowing the non-normality effect of the hexagonal metal to be quantitatively determined. The homogenization-based crystal plasticity model is used for representing the polycrystalline behavior of a HCP metal. The role of each slip system in the subsequent yield behavior is investigated. The mechanism of subsequent yielding of the HCP metal, which induces the non-normality effect, is discussed.

A Modified Storen-Rice Bifurcation Analysis of Sheet Metal Forming Limit Diagrams

Bifurcation analysis is a theoretical prediction approach to measure the FLD when the localized neck causes development of vertex on subsequent yield surface as was adopted by Storen-Rice. Some analyses lead to solutions for special cases such as zero and minimum extension. They offer an equation which needs to be optimized with respect to the minimum limit strain versus neck orientation for the whole domain of FLD. Moreover, the previous reported results for the left-hand side of FLD are not quite satisfactory. In this paper, a re-investigation into bifurcation analysis adopted by S-R lead to modified equations which significantly improved FLD and could be respected as a more general approach to find FLD theoretically. The derivation and optimization procedure of equations are indicated and discussed in detail. The predicted limit strains are studied for different work hardening coefficients and compared with Storen-Rice, Zhu and some experimental data and the obtained results show more agreement. Furthermore, the present restrictions and the required conditions for validation of the Zhu approach are fully discussed.