A novel mechanical attachment for biaxial tensile test: Application to formability evaluation for DP590 at different temperatures

A novel mechanical attachment for conducting in-plane biaxial tensile test is provided in this paper. In this attachment, the conversion of force from an external actuator into two pairs of orthogonal forces is achieved by specially designed trapezoidal blocks. By using trapezoidal blocks with different inclination angles, biaxial tensile tests of six different tensile ratios can be performed. A heating device is designed for the attachment to conduct thermal biaxial tensile tests. The heating device adopts a combination of the induction heating technology and the conduction heating method. With the developed mechanical attachment and the heating device, the forming limit curves (FLC) of DP590 sheets at ambient temperature, 300 °C, 400 °C and 500 °C are determined using biaxial tensile tests. A classical Nakazima test procedure at ambient temperature is carried out to establish a reference FLC for the material, and the reference FLC is further used to evaluate the results from biaxial tensile tests. Furthermore, an anisotropic GTN model based on Yld2000-3d yield criterion is calibrated by inverse identification procedures and applied to predict the localized necking and fracture for DP590 sheets under biaxial tensions.