The concept of virtual material testing and its application to sheet metal forming simulations

A crystal plasticity based full-field microstructure simulation approach is used to virtually determine mechanical properties of sheet metals. Microstructural features like the specific grain morphology and the crystallographic texture are taken into account to predict the plastic anisotropy. A special focus is on the determination of the Lankford coefficients and on the yield surface under plane stress conditions. Compared to experimental procedures, virtual material testing allows to generate significantly more data points on the yield surface. This data is used to calibrate anisotropic elasto-plastic material models which are commonly used for sheet metal forming simulations. A numerical study is carried out to analyze the influence of the chosen points on the yield surface on the calibration procedure.