The superplastic forming potential of two fine-grained S083 aluminum alloys were studied under biaxial tension using a pneumatic bulge test. Experiments were performed at temperatures ranging from 475 to 525℃with three different strain paths ranging from equi-biaxial to approaching plane strain. The shape of the forming limited diagram(FLD) is found to be significantly different from FLDs commonly used in room temperature stamping. The effects of temperature on final thickness distribution, dome height and cavitation were investigated for the case of equi-biaxial stretching. Increasing temperature in free bulge forming can improve the thickness distribution of final parts but have no significant effect on dome height. The results indicate that determination of forming limits in SPF cannot be represented with a simple FLD and additional metrics such as external thinning and internal cavitation needed to determine the SPF potential of a material.
To gain a better understanding about texture evolution during rolling process of AZ31 alloy, polycrystalline plasticity model was implemented into the explicit FE package, ABAQUS/Explicit by writing a user subroutine VUMAT. For each individual grain in the polycrystalline aggregate, the rate dependent model was adopted to calculate the plastic shear strain increment in combination with the Voce hardening law to describe the hardening response, the lattice reorientation caused by slip and twinning were calculated separately due to their different mechanisms. The elasto-plastic self consistent （EPSC） model was employed to relate the response of individual grain to the response of the polycrystalline aggregate. Rolling processes of AZ31 sheet and as-cast AZ31 alloy were simulated respectively. The predicted texture distributions are in aualitative a^reement with experimental results.
Two alternative formulations of single crystal plasticity model were introduced respectively and two schemes were implemented in the explicit FE code with software ABAQUS/Explicit by writing the user subroutine VUMAT.Meshes containing material data were created with solid elements.Each element represented an individual grain,and the grain orientations were explicitly stored and updated at each increment.Tangential modulus method was employed to calculate the plastic shear strain increment of deformation systems in combination with a hardening law to describe the hardening responses.Both two developed subroutines were applied to simulate the texture evolution during the uniaxial tension of copper（FCC）,cold rolling of IF steel（BCC） and uniaxial compression of AZ31 magnesium alloy（HCP）.The predicted texture distributions are in qualitative agreement with the experimental results.
