Prediction of Earing of Hot-Rolled Al Sheets from Pole Figures

Abstract

The formation of uneven cup heights during deep drawing is called earing. This phenomenon is caused by the planar anisotropy of formability in sheets, which is the result of crystallographic texture. In addition to analytical and finite element methods, a simple and quick method was developed recently to predict the earing profile of Al sheets solely from the data of {200} pole figures. So far, the method was applied on final state sheets cold rolled to 0.3–3 mm thickness and subsequently annealed. Within this manuscript, the earing prediction method is applied on 3003 type Al sheets with the thickness of ~6 mm, being in the hot-rolled state. Texture examinations were performed at different depths, from which earing profiles were calculated. For comparison, earing profiles were calculated from Lankford values that were determined by tensile tests. It is shown that in the case of hot-rolled Al sheets, if the grain structure is uniform across the thickness of the sheet, the earing profile can be appropriately calculated from the full {200} pole figure obtained from surface X-ray Diffraction (XRD) texture measurements.

Keywords

• aluminum
• hot-rolled sheet
• texture
• earing