Micro
Micro
Micro
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: With the increasing demand for the quality and quantity of miniaturized parts, fabrication of microparts
Received 1 January 2015 directly using sheet metals is proven to be promising and efficient for mass production. In this process,
Revised 29 May 2015 however, there are many unknowns in terms of size effect and its affected fracture and deformation
Accepted 30 May 2015
behavior. This study is thus aimed at investigating the micromechanical damage and deformation behav-
Available online 19 June 2015
ior in progressive microforming and establishing a systematic knowledge to support the microformed
part design, process configuration and tooling design. In detail, a micro cylindrical part is fabricated
Keywords:
via shearing process and a multi-level flanged part is produced via progressive micro extrusion and
Progressive microforming
Ductile fracture
blanking. To explore the effect of material microstructure on the deformation behavior, ductile fracture
Size effect and the product quality of microformed part, the original sheet metals are annealed under different
Material flow temperatures. To realize the microforming process, a progressive microforming system is developed
Fracture criterion and its characteristics are investigated. The effect of grain size on dimensional accuracy, microstructure
evolution and fracture behavior in microforming is also studied. The ductile fracture and its induced
defects are identified and the damage accumulation is predicted. In the end, the validity and applicability
of different fracture criteria in microforming is discussed.
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction some issues and phenomena induced by size effect such as defor-
mation behavior, damage accumulation, dimensional accuracy,
Micro/meso-scaled parts have been widely used in electronics, friction, springback and deformation defects in microforming have
automobiles, dyeing textile, aerospace and biomedicine in tandem been performed for the efficient development of microparts by this
with the ubiquitous trend of product miniaturization [1,2]. To meet promising micro-manufacturing process [7–11].
the increasing market demand and product quality requirement On the other hand, the microforming for mass production of
for microparts, micro-manufacturing technologies including microparts and its process chain have not yet been studied exten-
micromachining, laser processing, microinjection, lithography sively. To realize the batch production of microparts using micro-
and microforming have been developed to fabricate the forming, the difficulty in handling, transporting, stripping and
micro-scaled parts and components. From manufacturing perspec- positioning of billet, preform, semi-finished or final part must be
tive, microforming fabricates microparts with the desirable overcome [12,13]. One way of handling and positioning microparts
geometries via plastic deformation and has been proven to be is using robot and advanced gripper system, which is proven to be
promising for mass production for its high productivity and excel- complicated, tailor-made, less efficient and costly [14]. To address
lent mechanical properties of microformed parts, together with the handling, transportation and ejection issues in microforming,
low production cost [3,4]. Hirota [15] put forward a new method to fabricate micro billet
Nowadays, the development of micro/meso-forming system is via extruding the sheet metal in thickness direction, and studied
generally conducted through trial-and-error based on the scaling the effect of constraint condition on the height of the extruded bil-
down and modification of the conventional macro-forming system let. Based on this, the concept of progressive microforming by
design. In microforming, the design and fabrication of microparts directly using sheet metal was developed by Fu and Chan
cannot be simply conducted via leveraging the knowledge of [16,17]. They further examined the feasibility of this process to
macroforming to microforming since the size effect could be a bar- fabricate meso/micro-scaled parts with more complex features
rier to this knowledge transfer [5,6]. Therefore, the researches on and explored the process characteristics using different micro-
formed part sizes and the materials with different grain sizes.
Ghassemali et al. [18–20] also used this process to manufacture
⇑ Corresponding author. micro-pins directly using copper strip.
E-mail address: mmmwfu@polyu.edu.hk (M.W. Fu).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2015.05.088
0264-1275/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25 15
In progressive microforming, the knowledge of deformation and research is thus aimed at addressing these issues and exploring
fracture behavior are very important, which supports defect-free how the factors including material property, microstructure and
micropart design, process determination, die design and product process variables affect the fracture behavior and product quality
quality assurance. In macroforming, huge efforts have been pro- via experiment and finite element analysis. Meanwhile, the valid-
vided to reveal the ductile fracture behavior of different materials ity and applicability of the existing ductile fracture criteria in pro-
under different stress conditions. To name a few, Wierzbicki et al. gressive microforming will also be investigated and discussed.
[21] presented a thorough comparative study of seven commonly
used fracture criteria to identify their suitability in the prediction
2. Experimental details and numerical simulation
of fracture, and they found that Xue–Wierzbicki model agrees well
with the experimental results. Li et al. [22] investigated the relia-
2.1. Testing material
bility and validity of two categories of fracture criteria, viz. coupled
and uncoupled fracture models, in ductile failure scenarios and
Pure copper sheet metal with the thickness of 1.52 mm was
revealed that the applicability of fracture criteria depends on the
used as the testing material. To explore how the original
damage evolution and the factors including pressure stress, stress
microstructure of sheet metal affects the ductile fracture and
triaxiality, Lode parameter, equivalent plastic strain and shear
deformation behavior in progressive microforming, the material
stress. Mori et al. [23] developed a slight clearance punching pro-
was annealed at different temperatures and holding times, viz.,
cess using a small round edge to improve the quality of the sheared
500 °C for 2 h, 600 °C for 2 h and 750 °C for 3 h in vacuum environ-
edge, and they found that the delayed fracture did not happen and
ment. The average grain sizes of the sheet metal are 11.1, 21.9, 23.3
the fatigue strength was enhanced due to the large compressive
and 37.8 lm corresponding to the conditions of the as-received
stress around the sheared edge in such punching process. In addi-
and annealed at 500, 600, and 750 °C, respectively. To obtain the
tion, Achouri et al. [24] investigated the physical damage mecha-
flow behavior of the used materials with different states, uniaxial
nisms in punching operation, and further established an
tensile tests were performed to obtain the flow stress curves, as
improved numerical formula to predict the fracture location based
shown in Fig. 1. It can be seen that the flow stress of the
on the micromechanical approach. Furthermore, Liu and Fu [25,26]
as-received sample is greater than that of the annealed one, which
proposed a modified ductile criterion for fracture prediction of
can be explained based on the decrease of grain boundary
sheet metal forming, and verified its validity by flexible die form-
strengthening effect with the increase of grain size. However, the
ing and hemispherical bulging.
fracture strain of the as-received sheet metal is lower than that
Even though the existing fracture criteria have been proven to
of the annealed ones. The grain size effect can be represented by
be accurate in macro-scaled deformation, the geometry and grain
the Hall–Petch relation, which articulates that the flow stress
size effects on the criteria in micro/meso scale deformation should
grows linearly with the reciprocal square root of grain size [17].
be considered to represent how the scale factor affects failure
behavior. Among those efforts, Shim et al. [27] investigated the
shearing mechanism in blanking of thin foils by finite element 2.2. Progressive microforming system
method, and examined the Cockroft and Latham’s fracture criterion
to predict the fracture location. Furushima et al. [28] examined the The schematic illustration of the developed progressive micro-
ductile fracture and free surface roughening behavior for pure cop- forming system for the fabrication of the micro flanged part is
per foils and sheets with initial thicknesses spanning from 0.05 to shown in Fig. 2, which consists of shearing, blanking and extrusion
0.3 mm, and evaluated the applicability of various ductile fracture operations. The copper sheet with the dimension of
criteria for fracture prediction during the stretch forming. Yu et al. 80 10 1.52 mm is used. There are four processing operations
[29] explored the fracture behavior and the shear fracture angles of in each stroke. In the first step, the sheet metal undergoes shearing
aluminum 6061 sheets, and also discussed the fracture mechanism deformation. A cylindrical part is blanked out and a hole in the
and size effect during tensile test. Ran et al. [30,31] addressed the sheet metal is pierced, which is used for positioning in the subse-
size effect on ductile fracture in micro-scaled plastic deformation, quent operations. In the second and third operations, the work-
and further proposed a hybrid flow stress model to predict the duc- piece is extruded in thickness direction to form the multilevel
tile fracture in microforming. Xu et al. [32] extended the flanged features, and a portion of the material is further pressed
GTN-Thomason model by considering the geometry and grain size into the die orifice. It is noted that the formed part at the first three
effects in micro/meso scale, and investigated the size effects of stages is attached to the sheet metal, which makes it easier for
scale factor on the failure behavior of sheet metals. handling, positioning and transferring to the next step. In the last
Based on the above brief review, the prior researches on frac- operation, the flanged part is removed from the strip by blanking
ture and deformation behavior of sheet metals are mainly focused operation. Considering the machine capacity and the mechanical
on the individual forming operation under different stress condi-
tions. For progressive microforming, however, the ductile fracture
and its induced defects resulted from a great amount of damage
accumulation and deformation inhomogeneity in different opera-
tion stages, have not yet been sufficiently explored and studied.
This is due in large part to the nascent state of progressive micro-
forming technology. The concept of using sheet metals as the billet
material in progressive microforming is novel and advantageous. A
few typical micro-parts have already been fabricated by such pro-
cess. The unique deformation behavior and damage accumulation
effect, however, remain unknown and need to be explored in gen-
eral. The process performance and the final product quality, on the
other hand, depend on the deformation and ductile fracture behav-
ior. Moreover, there is a lack of the detailed investigation into
dimensional accuracy, material flow behavior and microstructure
evolution of the formed parts by progressive microforming. This Fig. 1. Flow stress curves of the testing material under different states.
16 B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25
Fig. 2. Developed progressive microforming system: (a) schematic illustration and (b) testing machine and tooling installation.
von Mises yield criterion is used to characterize the yield behavior experimental value. Finally, the stress–strain relation of the ele-
of the copper sheet. ment is substituted into the damage formula, and the material con-
In sheet metal forming, ductile fracture occurs due to the nucle- stant is obtained via integration, as shown in Fig. 4. The material
ation, growth and coalescence of microvoids. Many fracture crite- constants under different conditions determined by this approach
ria have been developed to predict ductile fracture, which are are shown in Table 1. In the table, r1 is the maximum principal
classified into coupled and uncoupled categories. The coupled frac- stress, rm is the hydrostatic stress, r
is the equivalent stress, and
ture criteria incorporate the damage accumulation into the consti- C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5 are material constants.
tutive equations, and thus allow the material yield surface to be
modified by the change of the damage-induced density.
However, it is difficult to determine the material constants accu- 3. Results and discussion
rately in the coupled criteria. On the contrary, the uncoupled ones
have been widely used due to their more simple formulation and 3.1. Deformation behavior
easier calibration, despite their limitation in representing the dete-
rioration of the damaged materials. Thus, several uncoupled crite- 3.1.1. Stroke–load relation
ria were chosen and calibrated to investigate their validity and In this progressive microforming process, the deformation load
reliability in microforming in this research. For these criteria, dam- comes from different operations including shearing, extrusion and
age accumulation is formulated empirically or semi-empirically in blanking. Fig. 5 shows the load–stroke curves in the progressive
terms of the macroscopic variables that are closely related to frac- microforming process under different conditions. Considering the
ture initiation and propagation. The criteria can be defined in the operation sequence as mentioned before, three forming stages in
following: the progressive microforming chain are identified. In the first stage,
Z the flanged part is subjected to blanking deformation, and the final
ef
part can be obtained after the punch stroke reaches 0.5 mm. In the
f ðr; eÞde C c ð2Þ
0 second stage, the punch stroke from 0.5 to 2.0 mm stands for the
shearing process, which is used to fabricate the cylindrical part
where ef and e are the critical plastic strain and the equivalent and the locating hole. The last stage, viz., the punch stroke ranging
strain in the deforming body, respectively, r is the Cauchy stress from 2.7 to 3.8 mm represents the two-step extrusion process. It is
tensor, and Cc is the critical damage value. The material constant noted that the virtual stroke between shearing and extrusion, viz.,
Cc in fracture criterion can be calibrated by combining the uniaxial the punch stroke varying from 2.0 to 2.7 mm, is designed to accom-
tensile test and finite element simulation [33]. In this scenario, the modate different sheet thicknesses. It can be found that the defor-
maximum principal strain at rupture is first obtained via tensile mation load of the as-received sheet metal is larger than that of the
test, and then the tensile deformation process is simulated until annealed ones. This is attributed to the fact that the as-received
the maximum principal strain of a certain element reaches the
Fig. 4. Determination of the material constants in fracture criteria. Fig. 5. Load–stroke behavior under different forming states.
Table 1
Material constants in different fracture criteria under different material conditions.
material was hardened in rolling process, in addition to grain is made by the third operation. It is found that there is a shear band
boundary strengthening effect. However, the number of grains is extending from punch edge to die orifice. The grains at the shear
reduced over the material thickness with annealing temperature, bands undergo severe plastic deformation, and the effective strain
resulting in an inhomogeneous deformation and a largely localized is thus highly localized in this region. For both Zones I and II, the
deformation of the coarse-grained material. shear band in the fine-grained material is larger than that of the
coarse-grained material. The shear band involves a large number
of grains to participate in the plastic deformation using the
3.1.2. Material flow behavior fine-grained material, resulting in more severe deformation in this
The flow pattern in progressive microforming is closely associ- region.
ated with the quality of the micro-part in terms of surface integrity
and defect formation. Thus, understanding of the material flow
behavior is crucial for optimization of the process. Fig. 6 shows 3.2. Undesirable deformation and dimensional accuracy
the simulated material flow of the second forming operation. It
can be found that a considerable part of the materials flow laterally 3.2.1. Undesirable progressive deformation
at the beginning of the punch penetration, resulting in the short Undesirable deformation often occurs in the progressive micro-
extrudate. As the punch stroke grows, more and more materials forming process due to the strain accumulation and interactive
flow toward die orifice, leading to a rapid increase in the extrudate effects of different operations. According to the deformation mech-
height. This indicates that there is a critical zone to stream the anism, the irregular geometric defects of the flanged part are iden-
material flow into two directions. The inner material flows toward tified to exist in the three regions, as illustrated in Fig. 8. The
the die cavity to contribute the length of the extrudate, while the reasons for these defects are presented in Fig. 9. The features in
outer material flows outwards. The balance of the two flows Zone A are produced by the last two operations, viz., the second
depends on the resistance in the corresponding flow direction. In extrusion and blanking. The defects in this area are generated
addition, the length of the extrudate with the fine-grained material mainly from the blanking operation, as shown in Fig. 9(b). The
in the second operation (1.34 mm) is about 300 lm longer than blanking process itself can easily cause the burr and fracture in
that with the coarse-grained material (1.05 mm) when the punch the sidewall of the part, especially when the coarse-grained mate-
stroke is 1.0 mm, which is induced by the different flow rates in rial is utilized. On the other hand, the stepped feature extruded by
the extrusion direction. For a given part with a specified length the third operation is warped during the blanking process due to
of the extrudate, the forming system should be optimized to no constraint in the blanking process to constrain the formed
increase the amount of forward material flow. From this perspec- geometries. The defects in Zone B are mainly the inclinations of
tive, the fine-grained material is preferred in the progressive the stepped features, which are closely associated with the influ-
microforming. ence of the final blanking operation. When the flanged part is
Fig. 7 shows the flow textures in the extruded regions in the blanked, the deformation not only occurs in the shearing zone,
two continuous extrusion operations. In the figure, Zone I repre- but also interferes with the flanged features formed in the previous
sents the feature formed by the second operation, while Zone II stages. The defect in Zone C is mainly the irregular geometry and
Fig. 6. Distribution of the flow velocity in the second operation calculated by FE simulation.
B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25 19
burr induced by the interactive effect of the first two operations. At It is also observed from Fig. 8 that the undesirable progressive
the beginning of the process, the shearing operation leads to the deformation deteriorates with the increase of grain size. The seri-
rollover and burr on the sheet metal shown in Fig. 9(a). The burr ous inclination of the flanged feature, irregular shape as well as
on the sheet metal undergoes the extrusion deformation in the the obvious burr are found using the coarse-grained material.
next working procedure, which contributes to the rag and irregular That is due to the fact that the size and orientation of individual
deformation in Zone C. grains affect material flow behavior significantly when the
20 B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25
Fig. 9. Reasons for the undesirable deformation: (a) effect of shearing operation and
(b) effect of blanking operation.
Fig. 10. Dimensional variation of the flanged part: (a) diameter and (b) length.
characteristic dimension is in the order of grain size. In addition, the effect of additional material flow in the third operation. H2 and
the material stiffness and strength are reduced for the material H3 are the heights of the extrudate in the second and third opera-
annealed at high temperature, which contributes to the further tions, respectively. The variations of H2 and H3 present a decreasing
deformation of the formed features. In order to represent the effect trend with the increase of grain size due to the different material
of grain size on the part quality quantitatively, the dimensional flow patterns under different annealing temperatures. The height
accuracy of the formed features should be analyzed. H4 representing the length after extrusion shows a rising tendency
with the decrease of annealing temperature. However, there are
3.2.2. Dimensional accuracy some abnormal results under the annealed condition, which is
Dimensional accuracy is an important factor in micro-part attributed to the fact that the measured data overlaps with their
development, since it directly affects product quality and perfor- considerable standard error. Compared with the fine-grained
mance. In progressive microforming, the dimensional accuracy is material, the standard deviation of geometric dimension with the
mainly affected by material property, microstructure and process coarse-grained material is enhanced, indicating the shape stability
variables. Compared to macro-scale forming, there are new factors of the formed part worsens with the increase of grain size due to
that increase the complexity of the process such as small dimen- the inhomogeneous deformation. To fabricate the microparts for
sion and inhomogeneous deformation. They are characterized by a given material, the desirable length of the extrudate can be
some common or specific phenomena that affect the dimensional obtained accurately via compensating the punch stroke and using
accuracy of the fabricated parts. To evaluate how the grain size the fine-grained material.
affects the quality of the final part, three parts were formed and
measured under each material condition. The dimensional varia- 3.3. Ductile fracture behavior
tion of the two-level flanged parts is shown in Fig. 10.
The desirable value of D1 is 3.75 mm, D2 is 2.2 mm, D3 is 3.3.1. Fracture surface
0.74 mm, D4 is 1.5 mm and D5 is 3.0 mm, as shown in Fig. 3. It is The ductile fracture is caused by the progressive degradation of
found that the diameters of the flanged part, viz. D1, D2, D3, D4 material stiffness when plastic deformation reaches a certain limit.
and D5 have the same geometries for both the fine- and In progressive deformation scenario, ductile fracture is easier to
coarse-grained materials, in contrast to the length of the extrudate. happen due to the cyclic deformation and severe damage accumu-
This is caused by the fact that the deformation along the diametri- lation. In this research, the ductile fracture phenomena are mainly
cal direction was restricted by tooling, while the material along the induced by the individual operation and the cumulative effect of
length direction underwent free deformation. As shown in the cyclic deformation. Figs. 11 and 12 show the fracture surfaces
Fig. 10(b), H1 represents the punch penetration in the second oper- of pure copper sheet observed by the scanning electron microscope
ation, and the value of H1 is greater than the designed value due to (SEM) after the shearing and blanking operations, respectively. It is
B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25 21
Fig. 12. Fracture surfaces on the flanged part after blanking operation: (a) as-received; (b) 500 °C; (c) 600 °C and (d) 750 °C annealed.
22 B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25
Fig. 13. Fracture surfaces on the flanged part after the second forming operation.
Fig. 14. Microcrack on the flanged part induced by the accumulative effect.
the figure, operation #1 is shearing operation, and operation #4 is predicted heights of rollover have a good agreement with the
blanking operation in the progressive microforming process chain. experimental results for all the fracture criteria. However, the
It can be seen that the USS predicted by all the selected fracture cri- numerical prediction of the size of the burr area is quite different
teria agrees well with the experimental stress in operation #1. In from the experimental results. The predicted height of burr zone
operation #4, however, there is a comparative deviation between was inconspicuous for all the fracture criteria. Indeed, the experi-
simulation and experiment except for using Ayada criterion. This mental burr takes up a considerable proportion of the whole pro-
could be caused by the damage accumulation effect induced by file. In addition, the numerical prediction of the size of fracture
the previous operations. Therefore, the ductile fracture criteria zone does not correspond to the experimental ones except for
developed in macro scale are not fully accurate in progressive Ayada criterion. The other criteria, including C&L, normalized
microforming due to the size effect, work hardening and damage C&L, Brozzo and R&T models, are unable to predict the fracture ini-
accumulation. tialization and location correctly in the micro-shearing case.
Fig. 16 shows the sizes of various zones on the punched profile Fig. 17 shows the height of fracture zone and the inclination
predicted by the selected uncoupled criteria in shearing operation angle predicted by the uncoupled fracture criteria in the blanking
of the pure copper annealed at 500 °C. It is observed that the stage using the copper sheet annealed at 500 °C. In the figure, hf
B. Meng et al. / Materials & Design 83 (2015) 14–25 23
Fig. 15. Prediction of USS in shearing and blanking operations of the material Fig. 17. Evolution of hf and u in the blanking stage using different fracture criteria.
annealed at 500 °C using different criteria.
Fig. 19. Damage distribution in different stages of punch penetration in blanking operation of the material annealed at 500 °C.
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