Extracting material data for superplastic forming simulations

In subatomic particle physics, unstable particles can be studied with a so-called vertex detector placed inside a particle accelerator. A detecting unit close to the accelerator bunch of charged particles must be separated from the accelerator vacuum. A thin sheet with a complex 3D shape prevents the detector vacuum from polluting the accelerator vacuum. Hence, this sheet should be completely leak tight with respect to gases. To produce such a complex thin sheet, superplastic forming can be very attractive if a small number of products is needed. This is a forming process in which a sheet of superplastic material is pressed into a one-sided die by means of gas pressure.\ud In order to develop a material model which can be used in superplastic forming simulations, uniaxial and biaxial experiments are necessary. The uniaxial, tensile, experiments provide information about the one-dimensional material data, such as the stress as a function of equivalent plastic strain and strain rate. These data are extracted from the experiments by using inverse modeling, i.e. simulation of the tensile experiment. To fit these curves into a general material model, three parts in the uniaxial mechanical behavior are considered: initial flow stress, strain hardening and strain softening caused by void growth. Since failure in superplastic materials is preceded by the nucleation and growth of cavities inside the material, the void volume fractions of the tested specimens were also observed.\ud A very important factor in this research is the study of the permeability of the formed sheet with respect to gas. If internal voids start to coalesce, through-thickness channels will start to form, thereby providing a gas leak path. To study the twodimensional behavior, including the gas leakage, bulge experiments were performed. Within these experiments, circular sheets were pressed into a cylindrically shaped die. From these experiments it followed that the plastic straining is dependent on an applied backpressure during the forming stage. This backpressure can postpone cavity nucleation and growth

A constitutive model for the superplastic material ALNOVI-1 including leak risk information

For some applications, it is important that a formed sheet of material is completely gas tight, therefore it is beneficial to be able to predict whether a formed sheet will be leak tight for gases or not. Superplastic materials show the ability to attain very high plastic strains before failure. These strains can only be reached within a small range of tempera-ture and strain rate. In thecase of the alu-minium alloy ALNOVI-1 by Furukawa Sky Aluminium, the optimum superplastic be-haviour is found at 520 °C and at strain rates roughly between 10-4 to 10-2 s-1. Under these conditions, the mechanical behaviour of the material is highly strain rate depend-ent. This article describes a proposal for the constitutive model of ALNOVI-1, as can be incorporated into an FE code (like a user-defined material UMAT in ABAQUS), in which the leak risk can be implemented, as function of the cavity volume fraction. This will be done in a phenomenological way, using the results of uniaxial tensile and biaxial bulge experiments