Until recently, the formability limits by fracture have not been
of interest to sheet metal forming because once a neck appears
and spreads sideways under subsequent deformation,thinning will
progress very fast under decreasing loads or pressures until the
sheet cracks. As a result of this, research has been focused on the
formability limits at the onset of plastic instability (also known as
the forming limit curves, FLC’s). Nowadays,the experimental methods
and procedures for determining the FLC’s of metal sheets at
room temperature are well established in the international standard
ISO 12004-2 (ISO, 2008) and involve carrying out Nakazima
and Marciniak sheet formability tests.
The widespread utilization of finite element analysis in sheet
metal forming relaunched the discussion on the utilization of ductile
damage mechanics for predicting the onset offailure by fracture
and on the experimental methods and procedures for determining
the fracture loci in the principal strain space and in the space of
effective strain vs. stress triaxiality. Some authors combine data
retrieved from sheet and bulk formability tests (Wierzbicki et al.,
2005) while others consider that the differences in plastic flow
resulting from the plane stress conditions of sheet metal forming
and the three dimensional stress conditions of bulk metal forming
that are commonly used as a rationale to classify metal forming
processes into two-different groups must be treated differently