Variation of deep drawing steel grades’ properties in dependency of the stress state and its impact on FEA

In industrial sheet metal forming processes the complexity of parts has been increased within the last decade due to the demands on ambitious designs and lightweight construction. As the forming processes are often laid out near the limit of feasibility, small variations of process parameters and materials’ properties may lead to an increased scrap rate in serial production. The consideration of varying parameters in the computerized process design is generally realizable, but especially the modelling of the material properties’ variation in numerical simulation close to reality is not investigated comprehensively yet. The varying parameters considered in a so called stochastic simulation are often limited to the mechanical properties, which can be determined within the uniaxial tensile test. As within the forming process of a complex sheet metal part different stress states occur, the batch variation under different forming conditions has to be investigated in detail. Within this work a basic investigation for the consideration of the batch variation under different stress states is presented. Three coils of the same steel grade, the mild deep drawing steel DX56, are characterised experimentally in order to investigate the scatter band of the stresses between the three batches representing material variation close to reality. For this the flow behaviour is determined under uniaxial stress condition and under biaxial stress condition. Furthermore the results of the tests under biaxial stress condition lead to a batch specific biax-stress-point, which represents a further reference point for the yield locus interpolation according to Hill 90. The forming limit diagrams are determined experimentally for the three batches in order to reproduce scattering of the onset of necking as well. Based on the experimental results, three batch specific material models for FE-simulation are prepared and used as input parameters for numerical forming simulations. Using the cross die geometry with two different initial blank geometries, different stress states can be adjusted in four reference points, covering the stress states between uniaxial and biaxial stress condition, thus, the plane strain area. Within the reference points, the effect of materials’ properties variation on the risk of failure is evaluated.