Effect of evolutionary anisotropic hardening on the prediction of deformation and forming load in incremental sheet forming simulation

The incremental sheet forming (ISF) process typically accompanies large plastic strain without fracture exceeding uniform elongation or ultimate tensile strength (UTS) in the uniaxial tensile test. Therefore, ISF features improved formability compared to the conventional stamping process. Meanwhile, numerous studies have focused on modeling and simulation of formability in ISF where anisotropic yield function is one of the key constitutive laws for predicting sheet deformation. However, the conventional yield function is defined based on anisotropy of initial yielding, while the ISF modeling requires the deformation behavior at large strains beyond the UTS. In this study, an evolutionary anisotropic plasticity model is investigated based on Hill's 48 yield function combined with the non-associated flow rule; i.e., e-NAFR Hill's 48. The e-NAFR Hill's 48 model is implemented to the vectorized user-defined material subroutine in the commercial finite element software ABAQUS/Explicit. Then, the proposed FE model is applied to the forming of truncated cone, pyramid, and clover shaped single point incremental forming (SPIF) of an aluminum alloy 6014-T4 sheet. The simulated part profile, thickness variation, and forming force are compared with those of experiments. The evolutionary constitutive model shows an average accuracy of 99.15% in thickness prediction and 94.22% accuracy in forming force, demonstrating the importance of evolutionary sheet anisotropy in the SPIF process.