Experimental Procedure and Hardening Model to Consider Forming and Baking Effects in Simulation

This paper investigated an experimental method for bake hardening properties, a technique for deriving the true stress-strain curves after reaching the maximum load, and a constitutive equation considering both work hardening and bake hardening in order to apply the work hardening occurring in the forming process of parts and the bake hardening induced in the baking process to an automotive crash simulation. A general bake hardening test is that a pre-tensioned specimen is baked and then the same specimen is tensioned again without any further treatment. For a bake hardening test of automotive steel with a tensile strength of 1.2 GPa or more, fractures often occur in curvature section outside, an extensometer due to the difference in the material strength caused by non-uniform bake hardening. This causes a problem in that the bake hardening properties cannot be obtained. In this paper, to prevent curvature fracture, tensile specimens were re-machined in the uniformly deformed region of large specimens subjected to pre-strain, and the re-machined specimens with uniform strength in all regions were re-tensioned. In the bake hardening test of ultra-high strength steels with a tensile strength of 1 GPa or more, shear band fractures occur when the pre-strain is large. This makes it impossible to obtain a true stress-strain curve because there is no uniformly deformed region under a tensile test. To overcome this problem, a new method to calculate the true stress-strain curve by comparing experimental results and the load calculated by the local strain obtained from digital images was developed. This method can be applied not only where shear band deformation occurs, but also in necking deformation, and true stress-strain curves for strains up to 2 - 3 times the uniform elongation can be obtained. A new constitutive equation was developed since an appropriate hardening model is required to simultaneously apply the work hardening and the bake hardening to the simulation. For the newly developed model, the user material subroutine of LS-Dyna was configured, and the simulation was performed on the single hat specimens with pre-strain. When both work hardening and bake hardening were considered, there was a significant increase in absorbed energy compared to when only work hardening was considered. This means that both work hardening and bake hardening should be considered in the car crash simulations to enhance the accuracy of the simulation.