Evaluation of uncoupled ductile damage models for fracture prediction in incremental sheet metal forming

The formability limit in a typical incremental sheet forming (ISF) far exceeds the conventional estimate assuming necking failure. The material subjected to incremental forming fails by fracture. Although damage models have been used to correlate the failure in incremental forming, a detailed understanding of the failure mechanism spanning strain paths is not clear yet. In this work, three parts with varied shapes (hybrid five lobe, pyramid and variable wall angle conical frustum (VWACF)) were developed using ISF to cover a range of possible strain paths. The failure is predicted using established uncoupled phenomenological damage models. Damage models were calibrated for AA1050 aluminium sheet by the method of inverse approach using carefully designed tensile tests and FE simulations. Three different damage models were implemented as user subroutine in commercial software code, ABAQUS/Explicit and the results predicted were compared. The linear damage accumulation used to develop fracture locus under monotonic loading could not predict the failure limit in a benchmark single groove test. Therefore a non linear damage accumulation rule (NLDA) is implemented to simulate ISF. The parameters of the NLDA were calibrated from the single groove test. The fracture forming limits during ISF was established using circular grid analysis near the failure zone of the formed part. A good agreement can be found between the experimental observations and numerical predictions for fracture location and part height. It was observed that the overall predictive capability of Hosford Coulomb (HC) damage model is better among three damage models investigated for the given range of loading conditions. However all the three models under-predicted the experimental fracture strain measured in ISF. The possible explanation for the discrepancy is explored. © 2022 CIRP