Stress and strain based fracture forming limit curves for advanced high strength steel sheet

In this work, strain based fracture forming limit curve (FFLC) of advanced high strength (AHS) steel grade 980 was determined by means of experimental Nakajima stretch-forming test and tensile tests of samples under shear deformation. During the tests, a digital image correlation (DIC) technique was applied to capture the developed strain histories of deformed samples up to failure. The gathered fracture strains from different stress states were used to construct the FFLC. Subsequently, the FFLC in the strain space was transformed to a principal stress space by using plasticity theories. As a result, the fracture forming limit stress curve (FFLSC) of examined steel was obtained. Furthermore, fracture locus (FL) as a relationship between stress triaxialities and critical plastic strains was determined. Hereby, two anisotropic yield functions, namely, the Hill’48 and Yld89 model were taken into account and their effects on the calculated curves were investigated. To verify the applicability of the obtained limit curves, rectangular cup drawing test and forming tests of so-called Diabolo and mini-tunnel samples were performed. Obviously, the FFLSCs and FLs more accurately described the failure occurrences of 980 steel sheets than the FFLCs. In addition, it was found that the drawing depths predicted by the FLs and the Yld89 yield criterion slightly better agreed with the experimental results than those from the FFLSCs and the Hill’48 model, respectively.