THE SIMULATION OF THE ANISOTROPY OF ALUMINUM ALLOY SHEETS BY DEEP DRAWING: A CRUCIAL STUDY FOR THE AUTOMOTIVE AND MATERIALS ENGINEERING INDUSTRIES

Recently, the automotive industry has shown an increasing interest in utilizing thin aluminum alloy sheets to reduce the weight of various car components. The occurrence of uneven cup heights in deep drawing processes is called earing. This issue arises due to the planar anisotropy of sheets, a consequence of crystallographic texture. Therefore, this study involves a meticulously conducted cylindrical cupping test. For the experimental research, four different aluminum alloys were used, each with distinct mechanical and plastic properties. The experimental results of the drawing process were compared with the simulation results using the Simufact Forming software. Different numbers of elements were selected for experimental material with a 1 mm thickness to further compare the simulation results with experiments. In a separate simulation in the Simufact Forming software, the effect of the number of elements on the earing height and computing time was evaluated. The results obtained with five different solvers were compared within Simufact Forming. The results showed significant differences in computing times for the different types of solvers.