Identification of the plastic material behaviour through inverse methods and DIC: influence of the specimens geometry

Inverse methods offer a powerful tool for the identification of the elasto-plastic material properties of metals and present several advantages when compared to standard material tests such as tensile tests, compression tests, etc. In this paper a Finite Element (FE) based inverse method is adopted for the identification of the plastic material behaviour of the stainless steel SS304. The procedure is illustrated by performing 3 complex material tests: a bi-axial tensile test on a perforated cruciform specimen, a uni-axial tensile test on a perforated tensile specimen and a uni-axial tensile test on a more complex shaped specimen. The material behaviour obtained from these 3 tests is compared to the material behaviour obtained from simple tensile tests. The results clearly show that it is necessary to design the material test in accordance with the forming process that will be simulated afterwards in order to obtain useful FE results, especially when the material behaviour is described by simple phenomenological models. ©2009 Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc.status: publishe