Ductile fracture behavior of 5052 aluminum alloy sheet under cyclic plastic deformation at room temperature

Ductile fracture behavior of a 5052 aluminum alloy sheet undergoing cyclic plastic deformation is investigated in order to clarify the effect of cyclic plastic deformation on formability enhancement in incremental stretch sheet forming at room temperature. In the incremental forming, formability markedly increases owing to strain distribution and accumulation effects. The former effect is activated when the deformation region expands along tool paths. Thus, localization of deformation, which leads to necking or fracturing, can be prevented. On the other hand, local strain is accumulated without fracturing when a blank sheet is repeatedly subjected to out-of-plane deformation at the same position. In this paper, the effect of the strain accumulation due to cyclic deformation generated by bending and unbending is primarily focused on to discuss the effect on deformability. To apply cyclic plastic straining to the specimen, a cyclic stretch-bending test was adopted. A cyclic tensile test was also conducted for larger bending curvature. The experimental results show that cyclic bending–unbending affects the ductility of sheet metals. The fractography obtained by scanning electric microscopy also indicates that fewer and smaller voids are observed particularly on bending the inner side than on the outer side.