Multi-scale modelling of the development of heterogeneous distributions of stress, strain, deformation texture and anisotropy in sheet metal forming

A Finite Element (FE) method is used to simulate cup drawing of two sheet materials: a carbon steel (DC06) and an aluminium alloy (AA3103-O). The evolution of the deformation texture is simulated by the Taylor and ALAMEL models, and this in every integration point of the FE mesh. Such point is in fact treated as a representative volume element (RVE) at macro-scale, and consists of 5000 crystallites each with their own crystal orientation. Each time the texture is updated, the constitutive law which describes the anisotropic plastic response of the material at macro-scale is updated as well. The calculation time required for this is kept within reasonable limits thanks to an adaptive updating scheme. Comparisons of the predicted textures with textures measured at different locations have been done. The predicted and measured cup profiles have been compared as well. This made it possible to evaluate the increase in accuracy by taking texture updating into account or not.