Evaluation and Validation of Methods to Determine Limit Strain States with Focus on Modeling Ductile Fracture

In the manufacturing process of body in white components made from sheet metal it is state of the art to accompany the process by means of finite element analysis. A main criterion for determining a feasible tool design and production process parameters is the prediction of material failure, which can be categorized in instability and ductile fracture. The ductile fracture failure mode is more likely to occur, as more advanced high strength steels and aluminum alloys are used for body in white components. Therefore different approaches have been presented to model ductile fracture over the past years. This task is more challenging when the material is exposed to arbitrary loading paths that can occur in deep drawing processes. However there is no guideline for sheet metal forming applications to determine which models for predicting ductile fracture are suitable, which experiments are necessary and how calibration of model parameters and validation of model prediction can be performed. Additionally there is no standard established that prescribes the evaluation of limit strain states from experiments. Suitable limit strain states are a basic requirement for prediction of ductile fracture as they are used for calibration of fracture models. In this paper, two methods for evaluation of limit strains are discussed and applied to tensile specimens with circular hole and circular cut outs made from aluminum alloy AlSi0.6Mg0.5. One validation experiment is used to investigate failure prediction that is based on limit strain states from different evaluation methods.