Prediction of fracture in hub hole expansion process using ductile fracture criteria

Abstract

The hub hole in a wheel of vehicles usually formed with hole expansion process. Formability of material, especially the hole expansion ratio, is important to produce a fine hub hole. The hub hole expansion process is different from general forming process or bore expansion process in the viewpoint of forming a thick plate. In the hole expansion process of the plate with a hole, as the hole being expanded, the crack is occurred to outward direction at the boundary of a hole. Therefore, it is need to apply the fracture criterion in the hub hole expansion process. In this paper, the hub hole expansion process is simulated with commercial elasto-plastic finite element code, LS-DYNA3D considering some ductile fracture criteria. Fracture mode and hole expansion ratio is compared with respect to the fracture criteria. Analysis results demonstrate that only the effective plastic strain is not adequate to predict the fracture mode in the hub hole. And the analysis results also indicate that the ductile fracture criteria properly predict the fracture mode but hole expansion ratio is different with the result of each other because of their different characteristics.