Microstructure based modeling of ductile fracture initiation in press-hardened sheet metal structures

The manufacturing of sheet metal components with spatially varying microstucture composition and mechanical properties using press-hardening technology is now an established practice in the automotive industry. To estimate the performance envelopes of such components, a multi-scale approach to ductile fracture prediction based on mean-field homogenization is proposed. Two non-interacting fracture criteria are formulated in terms of the local average stress field, referring to inter-phase and intra-phase fracture mechanisms. The overall ductility is governed by the weakest constituent or interface present in the multiphase material. Moreover, instabilities related to the strain localization problem at the macroscale are treated by embedding discontinuities in the element formulation. These are triggered by a localization criterion derived via bifurcation analysis of the homogenized material. Issues concerning numerical implementation include a forward Euler scheme for integrating the mean-field equations, suitable for explicit finite element analysis of heterogeneous materials. Tensile specimens with ten distinctly different microstructure compositions are evaluated, for which useful predictions of the overall force–displacement response and fracture elongations are demonstrated.