Experimental characterisation of the evolution of triaxiality stress state for sheet metal materials

Sheet metals are often used as safety structures in automotive applications where the fracture behaviour is a key design parameter. Theoretical and experimental observations have shown that the fracture behaviour of many metals depends on the stress state. Modelling the stress state dependency of fracture in Finite Element (FE) simulations has led to the development of advanced stress state dependent fracture criteria. The calibration of advanced fracture models is currently limited by the characterisation methods, which have not developed much during the last decades. Experimental characterisation methods that can determine the stress state accurately are necessary to ensure reliable calibrations of advanced fracture models. In this article, an experimental method to obtain the stress state and its evolution during deformation is presented. The stress state evolution is determined using measured local displacement field data, which were obtained by digital image correlation, coupled with a stepwise modelling method. This article shows that the stepwise modelling method can capture the stress state evolution for three different specimen geometries subjected to tensile loading. The resulting experimentally determined stress state evolutions are compared with the results of FE simulations, and both results are in good agreement. The accurate stress state evolutions characterised directly from experiments using the proposed method enables calibration of advanced fracture models rapidly and reliably.