Forming of AA5182-O and AA5754-O at elevated temperatures using coupled thermo-mechanical finite element models

A temperature-dependent anisotropic material model was developed for two aluminum alloys AA5182-O and AA5754-O and their anisotropy parameters were established. A coupled thermo-mechanical finite element analysis of the forming process was then performed for the temperature range 25–260 °C (77–500 °F) at different strain rates. In the developed model, the anisotropy coefficients for Barlat’s YLD2000-2d anisotropic yield function [Barlat, F., Brem, J.C., Yoon, J.W., Chung, K., Dick, R.E., Lege, D.J., Pourboghrat, F., Choi, S.H., Chu, E., 2003. Plane stress yield function for aluminum alloy sheets – Part 1: Theory. Int. J. Plasticity 19, 1297–1319] in the plane-stress condition and the parameters for the isotropic strain hardening were established as a function of temperature. The temperature-dependent anisotropic yield function was then implemented into the commercial FEM code LS-DYNA as a user material subroutine (UMAT) using the cutting-plane algorithm for the integration of a general class of elastoplastic constitutive models [Abedrabbo, N., Pourboghrat, F., Carsley, J., 2006b. Forming of aluminum alloys at elevated temperatures – Part 2: Numerical modeling and experimental verification. Int. J. Plasticity 22 (2), 342–737]. The temperature-dependent material model was used to simulate the coupled thermo-mechanical finite element analysis of the stamping of an aluminum sheet using a hemispherical punch under the pure stretch boundary condition (no material draw-in was allowed). Simulation results were compared with experimental data at several elevated temperatures to evaluate the accuracy of the UMAT’s ability to predict both forming behavior and failure locations. Two failure criteria were used in the analysis; the M–K strain based forming limit diagrams (ε-FLD), and the stress based forming limit diagrams (σ-FLD). Both models were developed using Barlat’s YLD2000-2d anisotropic model for the two materials at several elevated temperatures. Also, as a design tool, the Genetic Algorithm optimization program HEEDS was linked with the developed thermo-mechanical models and used to numerically predict the “optimum” set of temperatures that would generate the maximum formability for the two materials in the pure stretch experiments. It was found that a higher temperature is not needed to form the part, but rather the punch should be maintained at the lowest temperature possible for maximum formability.