Investigation on the strain-path dependency of stress-based forming limit curves

Path-dependent forming limits have been computed for sheet metals undergoing various combinations of plane stress loading conditions. This paper presents a theoretical model for prediction of stress-based forming limit curves (SFLC) based on the Marciniak and Kuczynski (MK) model. Acceptable agreement was observed between calculated forming limit curves (FLC) and experimental data for AISI-1012 steel (Molaei 1999) and AA-2008-T4 alloys (Graf and Hosford Metallurgical Trans 24A:2503–2512, 1993). In this paper, the path dependency of SFLCs predicted for different non-proportional loading histories has been investigated. For a range of prestrain values in different bilinear loading paths, the SFLC remains practically unchanged. However, some strain path dependency is observed for large values of prestrain ( $ \bar{\varepsilon } \geqslant 0.35 $ for AISI-1012 steel) and for abrupt changes in strain path. Nevertheless, the SFLC remains a good failure criterion for virtual forming simulations because the path dependency of SFLCs is much less significant than that of strain-based FLCs.