A new polycrystal model was presented from the viewpoint of polycrystal structure of the billets considering free surface effects.In the model,the billet was divided into three portions,such as free surface portion,transition portion and internal portion.The grains in free surface portion were considered the single grains,and the anisotropy of the grains was taken into account by introducing grain orientation to explain the inhomogeneous deformation.In the transition portion,the effects of the neighbouring grains were adopted in the model.The grains in the internal portion were considered the polycrystalline material.With the developed model,the upsetting deformation process was simulated by the MSC Superform software.The scatter of the flow stress and inhomogeneous deformation was observed by analysis of the model.The comparisons show that the computational results are good agreed with the experimental results.This means that the presented model is effective.
To analyze the effect of single grain deformation behaviors on microforming process, a crystal plasticity model was developed considering grains at free surface layer as single grains. Based on the rate-dependent crystal plasticity theory, the analysis of the scale effect mechanism on upsetting deformation of micro rods was performed with respect to specimen dimension, original grain orientation and its distribution. The results show that flow stress decreases significantly with the scaling down of the specimen. The distribution of the grain orientation has an evident effect on flow stress of the micro specimen, and the effect becomes smaller with the progress of plastic deformation. For the anisotropy of single grains, inhomogeneous deformation occurs at the surface layer, which leads to the increase of surface roughness, especially for small specimens. The effect of grain anisotropy on the surface topography can be decreased by the transition grains. The simulation results are validated by upsetting deformation experiments. This indicates that the developed model is suitable for the analysis of microforming processes with characteristics, such as scale dependency, scatter of flow stress and inhomogeneous deformation.
With the miniaturization of parts,size effects occur in the micro-forming processes.To investigate the effects of the specimen size on the flow stress,a series of upsetting deformation experiments were carried out at room temperature for specimens with different diameters.And the grain size of billets was changed by anneal processes to analyze the grain size effects on the size dependence of flow stress.The deviation of stress was observed.The results show that the flow stress decreases with decreasing billet dimensions.As the dislocation accumulation in free surface layer is slight,the reduction degree of flow stress becomes larger when the plastic deformation goes on.The flow stress is enlarged by grain size,which can be analyzed by the grain boundary length per area.The deviation increases with decreasing specimen size.This can be explained by the effects of grain orientation stochastic distribution according to the Schmid law.As a result,the micro-forming process must be considered from the viewpoint of polycrystalline structure,and the single grains of micro-billet dominate the deformation.
