Prediction of Residual Stress on Cold-Formed Curvature Plates by Elastoplastic Material Model

Abstract

To meet the demand of automatic production, the multisquare punch forming has been improved to process complex curved plates. However, the improved forming equipment improves the processing quality to the maximum extent, and springback and residual stresses are inevitable phenomena in the cold bending process. Residual stress is an important factor that causes fatigue crack and stress corrosion crack. And the residual stress in machining will seriously affect the fatigue life of cold-pressed parts. Therefore, it is necessary to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the residual stress caused by the cold forming equipment. Through theoretical derivation and finite element simulation methods, the residual stress distribution for thick plates in the cold forming process was analyzed and compared in this article. Meanwhile, the variation law of residual stress peak with thickness and forming radius was further discussed. The results show that the residual stress distributions obtained by the two theoretical models are in good agreement with the numerical results. The maximum error of peak residual stress is about 10%, which verifies the reliability of theoretical formulas. 1. Introduction A large number of complex curved sheet metal parts are used in aerospace, marine structure, automobile, and other manufacturing industries, which makes the processing and forming of complex curved sheet metal parts attract much attention. In the process of ship construction, the forming and processing of hull plates is an important part of the low intelligence, time-consuming, and serious constraint on shipbuilding automation. Strictly speaking, most of the parts in the hull plate are three-dimensional curved surfaces, most of which are composed of complex undevelopable spatial curved surfaces. It is a very difficult and urgent key technology to process a ship's steel plate into complex three-dimensional curved surface shapes. such as saddle shape or sailed shape (see Fig. 1A), to create a streamlined outer body of the ship. For many years, bending of plates with complex curvatures has been carried out by manual operation, i.e., the combination of heat line forming and rolling bending (see Fig. 1B). However, the production efficiency of the thermoforming process is relatively low, and environmental pollution is relatively serious with bad working conditions and high labor intensity. Moreover, the forming quality depends more on the experience of technicians, and quality cannot be guaranteed. With the increasing demand for automation, the multipoint forming equipment was developed and used for stamping and forming of curved plates.