Drawability assessment of BCC steel sheet by using elastic/crystalline viscoplastic finite element analyses

Elastic/crystalline viscoplastic finite element (FE) analyses were carried out to asses the drawability of three kinds of BCC steel sheets, such as mild steel, dual-phase steel and high-strength steel, in the cylindrical cup deep drawing processes. In this study, the crystal orientations were obtained by X-ray diffraction and orientation distribution function (ODF) analyses. The measured DF results have revealed clearly different textures of sheets, featured by orientation fibers, skeleton lines and selected orientations in Euler angle coordinate space, which can be related to the plastic anisotropy. An orientation probability assignment method, which can be categorized as an inhomogenized material modeling, was used in this FE modeling. The orientations were determined from the measured ODF and assigned to FE integration points one by one. Numbers of integration points, which represent crystallites and can rotate individually, are employed to represent textures of the sheet metals for taking account of the initial and evolutional plastic anisotropy without introducing Taylor or Sachs homogenization assumption. The FE analyses showed how the fiber textures affect the strain localization and earing in the deep drawing operation. It was confirmed by comparison with experimental results that this FE code could predict the extreme strain localization and earing with good accuracy and assess the sheet drawability. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.