To accurately predict the occurrence of ductile fracture in metal forming processes, the Gurson-Tvergaard （GT） porous material model with optimized adjustment parameters is adopted to analyze the macroscopic stressstrain response, and a practical void nucleation law is proposed with a few material constants for engineering applications. Mechanical and metallographic analyses of uniaxial tension, torsion and upsetting experiments are performed. According to the character of the metal forming processes, the basic mechanisms of ductile fracture are divided into two modes： tension-type mode and shear-type mode. A unified fracture criterion is proposed for wide applicable range, and the comparison of experimental results with numerical analysis results confirms the validity of the newly proposed ductile fracture criterion based on the GT porous material model.
A fracture criterion derived from a microscopic point of view is proposed and has proved to be effective in the analysis of uniaxial tension. On the one hand, a method of predicting a ductile fracture is proposed using a three-dimensional void model and the assumption of velocity discontinuity. The relationship between the void volume fraction and the critical strain to fracture, calculated with the help of the new model, shows the same tendency as that obtained from the modified Thomason model. On the other hand, the mechanical and metallographic analyses of the uniaxial tension experiment are performed using four kinds of carbon steel. The relationship between the void volume fraction and the critical strain to fracture, calculated from the new model, agrees better with the result obtained from the experiment, rather than that calculated by the modified Thomason model, which confirms the validity of the ductile fracture criterion based on the three-dimensional void model.
The one-step finite element method （FEM）, based on plastic deformation theory, has been widely used to simulate sheet metal forming processes, but its application in bulk metal forming simulation has been seldom investigated, because of the complexity involved. Thus, a bulk metal forming process was analyzed using a rapid FEM based on deformation theory. The material was assumed to be rigid-plastic and strain-hardened. The constitutive relationship between stress and total strain was adopted, whereas the incompressible condition was enforced by penalty function. The geometrical non-linearity in large plastic deformation was taken into consideration. Furthermore, the force boundary condition was treated by a simplified equivalent approach, considering the contact history. Based on constraint variational principle, the deformation FEM was proposed. The one-step forward simulation of axisymmettic upsetting process was performed using this method. The results were compared with those obtained by the traditional incremental FEM to verify the feasibility of the proposed method.
