Influence of out-of-plane compression stress on limit strains in sheet metals

The prediction of the forming limits of sheet metals typically assumes plane stress conditions that are really only valid for open die stamping or processes with negligible out-of-plane stresses. In fact, many industrial sheet metal forming processes lead to significant compressive stresses at the sheet surface, and therefore the effects of the through-thickness stress on the formability of sheet metals cannot be ignored. Moreover, predictions of forming limit curves (FLC) that assume plane stress conditions may not be valid when the forming process involves non-negligible out-of-plane stresses. For this reason a new model was developed to predict FLC for general, three-dimensional stress states. Marciniak and Kuczynski (Int J Mech Sci 9:609-620, 1967) first proposed an analytical method to predict the FLC in 1967, known as the MK method, and this approach has been used for decades to accurately predict FLC for plane stress sheet forming applications. In this work, the conventional MK analysis was extended to include the through-thickness principal stress component (sigma(3)), and its effect on the formability of different grades of sheet metal was investigated in terms of the ratio of the third to the first principal stress components (beta = sigma(3)/sigma(1)). The FLC was predicted for plane stress conditions (beta = 0) as well as cases with different compressive through-thickness stress values (beta not equal 0) in order to study the influence of beta on the FLC in three-dimensional stress conditions. An analysis was also carried out to determine how the sensitivity of the FLC prediction to the through-thickness stress component changes with variations in the strain hardening coefficient, in the strain rate sensitivity, in plastic anisotropy, in grain size and in sheet thickness. It was found that the out-of-plane stress always has an effect on the position of the FLC in principal strain space. However, the analysis also showed that among the factors considered in this paper, the strain hardening coefficient has the most significant effect on the dependency of FLC to the through-thickness stress, while the strain rate sensitivity coefficient has the least influence on this sensitivity.