An equivalent work-hardening description of an interstitial-free steel sheet based on uniaxial tensile and hydraulic bulge tests

In this work, the plastic behavior of an interstitial-free steel sheet was first evaluated by standard uniaxial tensile and hydraulic bulge tests to reproduce the intermediate and high straining levels commonly observed in sheet metal forming processes. Next, a simple procedure was proposed to obtain an equivalent work-hardening curve, representing the high strain domain instead of the conventional uniaxial tensile data. This procedure involves an anisotropy parameter calculated based on Hill's quadratic criterion using the measured r-values in the rolling and transverse sheet directions. Under the assumption of an isotropic work-hardening, the equivalent curve is defined from the true stress and true thickness plastic-strain results of the hydraulic bulge test. The transformed data were fitted to usual power-law type equations to obtain an adequate work-hardening description for finite element numerical simulation purposes. Based on the goodness-of-fit measures, namely, R-squared, root-mean-square error, and root-mean-square of residual percentage, the combined Swift–Hockett–Sherby equation has proved to be the most suitable choice to describe the plastic behavior of the investigated interstitial-free steel under both intermediate and high strains conditions.