The Relative Sensitivity of Formability to Anisotropy

This work compares the relative importance of material anisotropy in sheet forming as compared to other material and process variables. The comparison is made quantitative by the use of normalized dependencies of depth to failure (forming limit is reached) on various measures of anisotropy, as well as strain and rate sensitivity, friction, and tooling. Comparisons are made for a variety of forming processes examined previously in the literature as well as two examples of complex stampings in this work. The examples cover a range from nearly pure draw to nearly pure stretch situations, and show that for materials following a quadratic yield criterion, anisotropy is among the most sensitive parameters influencing formability. For materials following higher-exponent yield criteria, the dependency is milder but is still of the order of most other process parameters. However, depending on the particular forming operation, it is shown that in some cases anisotropy may be ignored, whereas in others its consideration is crucial to a good quality analysis.