Influence of Local Microstructural Variations on the Bendability of Aluminum Extrusions: Experiments and Crystal Plasticity Analyses

The bendability of extruded profiles of an age hardenable aluminum alloy is investigated using mechanical tests on flat tensile specimens and bending specimens. Two profile geometries are considered, where the profiles exhibit different grain structures. The microstructure of the profiles in terms of the crystallographic texture and constituent particles is otherwise comparable. While the tensile properties are not that different for the two profiles, their bendability is strongly dependent on the grain structure and is about twice as high for one profile than for the other. A newly proposed coupled damage and single crystal plasticity model is used in finite element analyses of the mechanical tests to investigate the influence of the grain structure on the bending behavior, and the numerical results are compared to the experimental tests. The crystallographic texture and the grain morphology of the profiles, found by the electron back-scatter diffraction technique, are explicitly represented in the finite element models. The crystal plasticity simulations capture the difference in the bendability of the two profiles, and in agreement with the experiments predict a considerably higher bendability for one of the profiles. It is found that the grain structure affects the shear band formation in these profiles, but also the local texture where the shear bands are located is important for crack initiation and propagation as grains with certain crystallographic orientations may have a higher fracture resistance.