Enhancement of fracture forming limit by crystallographic texture reformation of AA1050 sheets in Single Point Incremental Forming

Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) process that results in the formation of sheet metal components leads to higher forming capabilities in comparison to conventional forming strategies. However, the formability in SPIF is critical and limited by the rapid/sudden failure in the sheet material (without material localization) for the components with high wall inclination angles. The state of stresses and strains plays a huge role in determining the forming limits in SPIF, which is complexly governed by various factors such as sheet thickness, lubrication, incremental step depth, tool rotational speed, part geometry, tool dimensions, and geometry, to name a few. The present work focuses on investigating formability of the sheets from its microstructure and crystallographic texture point of view. Preliminary experimentation led to the conclusion that SPIF of the original commercially supplied AA1050 H14 sheets results in early and premature failure. Microstructural investigation of the undeformed sheet showed that the commercially supplied sheets undergo strain hardening due to cold rolling and therefore, results in dislocated and disorientated microstructure and texture. The present work attempts to reform the microstructure of the sheet by preheating at the optimized temperature. Finite element analysis (FEA) of the process led to the observation that the reformed microstructures result in enhanced fracture forming limit strain and reduced stresses in SPIF. This may be attributed to the decrease in the number of dislocations and dislocated grains, and decrease in the surface area of grain boundary per grain with preheating. Improved fracture forming limits due to preheating were experimentally validated by utilizing digital image correlation technique (DIC) for acquiring true strain values subjected to fractured original and different preheated samples. (paper)