Micromechanical modeling of intrinsic and specimen size effects in microforming

Size effect is a crucial phenomenon in the microforming processes of metallic alloys involving only limited amount of grains. At this scale intrinsic size effect arises due to the size of the grains and the specimen/statistical size effect occurs due to the number of grains where the properties of individual grains become decisive on the mechanical behavior of the material. This paper deals with the micromechanical modeling of the size dependent plastic response of polycrystalline metallic materials at micron scale through a strain gradient crystal plasticity framework. The model is implemented into a Finite Element software as a coupled implicit user element subroutine where the plastic slip and displacement fields are taken as global variables. Uniaxial tensile tests are conducted for microstructures having different number of grains with random orientations in plane strain setting. The influence of the grain size and number on both local and macroscopic behavior of the material is investigated. The attention is focussed on the effect of the grain boundary conditions, deformation rate and the grain size on the mechanical behavior of micron sized specimens. The model is intrinsically capable of capturing both experimentally observed phenomena thanks to the incorporated internal length scale and the crystallographic orientation definition of each grain.