Investigation of thick sheet AHSS springback in combined bending under tension

In this paper, we investigate the springback behavior of several advanced high-strength sheet steels (TRIP, Dual-Phase, ferrite-bainite) with thicknesses up to 4 mm. Samples were tested by means of the bending-under-tension (BUT) test. The BUT has been extensively applied, in the literature, to relatively thin (1 mm and thinner) sheet metals for automotive applications; the applicability of several guidelines from the literature was investigated in this work in the context of thick advanced high strength steel (AHSS) sheets and using a sample width of 12 mm. The monotonic decrease of springback as back force increased was confirmed for this category of sheet steels, and a general trend for the non-linear influence of the tool radius was observed. With the selected sample width, the effect of the secondary curvature was negligible. Conclusions and simple guidelines are drawn from the analysis with industrial sheet forming applications in mind