SUMMARY

Most of the commercially used metals and alloys exhibit polycrystalline microstructures that are composed of numerous grains (individual crystals). In these metals and alloys, plastic deformation occurs mainly through the movement of dislocations. Crystal plasticity models have been developed and used over the past several decades to describe physically the behavior of metals. They not only provide better predictions of the anisotropic material response but can also capture the texture evolution in a polycrystalline sample. However, crystal plasticity models are extremely computationally expensive, limiting their adoption. In this work, this limitation is addressed by using a recently developed spectral database approach based on discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs). This approach has demonstrated impressive computational advantages over the conventional approaches. Despite their wide applicability, in some applications the DFT database approach has encountered significant hurdles such as for prediction of crystal plasticity based forming limit diagram (CP-FLD) and for carrying out simulations of crystal plasticity finite element method (CPFEM). Forming limit diagram (FLD) is the most commonly used indicator of localized necking in automotive industry. In this work, significant improvements were made to the prior approach and a new DFT database was developed to address these challenges. New database was integrated with M-K approach to develop spectral crystal plasticity forming limit diagram (SCP-FLD) numerical tool for very fast CP-FLD predictions. The new DFT database was also implemented with finite elements (FE) package ABAQUS through a user materials subroutine, UMAT to develop an improved spectral crystal plasticity finite element method (SCPFEM) framework, for computationally efficient CPFEM predictions of deformation processing. Proper utilization of these toolsets can lead to accelerated insertion of new and improved materials into practice.