Modelling void nucleation and growth in axisymmetric extrusion

Abstract

Elastic-viscoplastic constitutive equations, with kinematic and isotropic hardening, are employed to model the deformation behaviour of an aluminium alloy in extrusion. Constitutive equations are also employed for void nucleation and growth, which are fully coupled with the deformation behaviour. The material model is employed to investigate the roles of void nucleation and growth in extrusion defect formation. It has been shown that central bursting is a void growth controlled process. The existence of nucleated voids only leads to central burst formation with the existence of appropriate stress states which lead to void growth. The results obtained show excellent agreement with well-established limit diagrams, obtained analytically and experimentally. The results also show that for a given combination of area reduction and semi-cone die angle, the introduction of friction tends to inhibit the formation of central bursting, but increases the likelihood of surface tearing/cracking. The tendency to inhibit central burst formation with increasing friction results from the reduction in the levels of tensile hydrostatic stress, which therefore reduce the rate of void growth. A comparison of the results obtained using kinematic and isotropic hardening in the extrusion process showed that significantly different residual stress fields are obtained for the two cases. This is of importance, for example, in the case of multipass extrusion or where the residual stress field is to be used subsequently in design analysis.