Design of texture for improved formability of high-strength steel

The effect of crystallographic textures on the formability of BCC steel sheets has been studied by using crystalline plasticity finite element analysis (FEA) and experiments. It was confirmed that one of the important reasons why the conventional high-strength steel sheet has poor formability was due to lack of {111} fiber texture components —γ-fiber texture—. In this paper, a texture adjusted design method is proposed to improve the formability of conventional high-strength steel sheets. First, an artificial γ-fiber texture is defined in terms of a rotationally symmetric Gaussian distribution of deviation angles, which has a certain scatter width along the given γ-fiber skeleton line in Euler space. The analytic textures are designed by introducing the artificial γ-fiber texture into the conventional high-strength steel model. The blending coefficient corresponding to the {111}/{001} volume fraction ratio is selected as the design parameter. Then, an optimum crystallographic texture of steel sheet is found through the limit dome height (LDH) formability tests by employing as objective function, which is evaluated by a maximum thinning ratio of the deformed sheet. Further, it is demonstrated that the sheet with the optimum texture shows the best straining in VDI benchmark stamping tests.