Effect of crystalline anisotropy and forming conditions on thinning and rupturing in deep drawing of copper single crystal

Copper single crystal has excellent electrical properties and ductility, and it has a peculiar application in micro-manufacturing. In this paper, a specific mold was designed and made in order to conduct deep drawing of copper single crystal and evaluate the crystalline orientation effect to the local thinning and rupturing in the process. As a contrast, a finite element subroutine (VUMAT in ABAQUS) based on the crystal plasticity theory was developed to simulate the deep drawing process according to the experimental configurations. The results show that the (1 1 0) blank has better deep drawing performance than (0 0 1) blank; The crack of (0 0 1) blank originates at 〈1 0 0〉 orientation in the plane because 〈1 0 0〉 orientation has poor plasticity; friction is a crucial factor to the forming quality in a small scale deep drawing process; the simulations are in good agreement with the experiments, which also indicates the crystal plasticity model is very necessary to study the plastic forming of metallic material, especially the crystalline characteristics should be considered in the research.