Investigation of the flange earring of deep-drawing aluminum sheets by rate-independent polycrystalline plasticity finite element analysis

Plastic anisotropy, which exerts evident influence on the formability of sheet metals, is mainly caused by crystalline texture and its evolution. In this paper, a rate-independent crystalline plasticity constitutive model is developed and introduced into elasto-plastic dynamic explicit finite element method. The crystal orientations are assigned to FE integration points, which represent crystals and can rotate individually, according to characteristics of orientation distribution function in orientation space. Successive integration method is employed to determine active slip systems and calculate plastic strain rate. Then the cylindrical cup deep-drawing processes of rolled and annealing aluminum blanks are simulated and texture evolution is calculated based on the proposed rate-independent crystalline plasticity finite element method. The simulation results show good agreement with experimental ones. Finally, the influences of two initially typical crystal orientations on flanging earring are numerically analyzed, which is helpful to explain the experimental results.