Investigation of the effect of anisotropy on Generalized Forming Limit Diagram

In contemporary industrial practices, various methods are employed to subject raw metal sheets to deformation in order to fabricate requisite components. These sheets exhibit a defined capacity for deformation during the forming process. Over recent decades, a plethora of experimental and numerical methodologies have emerged to ascertain these forming limits. Initially, a forming limit diagram (FLD) was devised, predicated on the phenomenon of necking, under the assumption that forming takes place under plane-stress conditions. However, in certain complex processes like hydroforming and incremental forming, necking can manifest at sites where normal and through-thickness shear stresses act upon the sheet in addition to the in-plane stresses, rendering the plane-stress assumption inadequate for predicting forming limits in such scenarios. Thus, it becomes imperative to derive a diagram that can accurately forecast forming limits in these processes. This study aims to establish a Generalized Forming Limit Diagram (GFLD) through numerical means. GFLDs were constructed utilizing two distinct yield functions, namely Von-Mises and Hill48, for isotropic and anisotropic states, respectively. The findings reveal that normal compressive stress and through-thickness shear strain augment the formability of sheet metals. Furthermore, the outcomes illustrate that accounting for anisotropy introduces variances between diagrams in some regions of the FLD curve while the discrepancies are minor within the central regions.