Evaluation of bending limit curves of aluminium alloy AA6014-T4 and dual phase steel DP600 at ambient temperature

Bending/hemming operations are extensively used in automotive industries for assembling the car body panels. Besides the process mechanics, bending operation differs from biaxial sheet metal forming operations in failure mechanism also. Hence, the limit strains that material can sustain are different for both the operations. Thus, the conventional FLC proposed by Keeler and Goodwin fails to predict formability in bending/hemming operations. This necessitates the development of bending limit curves. In this work, bending limit curves are determined experimentally for AA6014-T4 and DP600. Effect of punch radius, nature and level of pre-strain on the bending limits is also studied. Thus, BLC can be used as a post-processing criterion in finite element simulations to assess formability during bending/hemming operations.