A Constitutive Material Model Applied to Microforming Processes

The plastic treatment of products reduced to sizes corresponding to the microscale poses difficulties, due to the occurrence of the so-called size effect, which is responsible for the different behavior of the material during the realization of microforming. In this study, a constitutive equation was elaborated taking into account two types of size effects, with the use of a surface model as well as a composite material model. The influence of the size effect referring to both the material grain size and the geometric scaling of the sample size on the material’s flow stresses was considered. The surface model took into account the different grain shapes present in actual polycrystalline materials. After the application of the presented model for titanium Grade 2, a good agreement of the experimental results with the FEM simulation results was obtained. Thus, the proper FEM modeling of microforming processes should be conducted with the use of a material model, taking into account the occurring size effects.