Acta Mechanica Solida Sinica, Vol. 23, No.

1, February, 2010 Published by AMSS Press, Wuhan, China

ISSN 0894-9166

IDENTIFICATION OF ELASTIC-PLASTIC MECHANICAL PROPERTIES FOR BIMETALLIC SHEETS BY HYBRID-INVERSE APPROACH

Honglei Zhang1
1

Xuehui Lin1,2

Yanqun Wang1

Qian Zhang1

Yilan Kang1

( School of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China) (2 School of Mechanical Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China)

Received 13 October 2008; revision received 9 October 2009

ABSTRACT Analysis, evaluation and interpretation of measured signals become important components in engineering research and practice, especially for material characteristic parameters which can not be obtained directly by experimental measurements. The present paper proposes a hybrid-inverse analysis method for the identication of the nonlinear material parameters of any individual component from the mechanical responses of a global composite. The method couples experimental approach, numerical simulation with inverse search method. The experimental approach is used to provide basic data. Then parameter identication and numerical simulation are utilized to identify elasto-plastic material properties by the experimental data obtained and inverse searching algorithm. A numerical example of a stainless steel clad copper sheet is considered to verify and show the applicability of the proposed hybrid-inverse method. In this example, a set of material parameters in an elasto-plastic constitutive model have been identied by using the obtained experimental data.

KEY WORDS identication of parameters, hybrid-inverse approach, elasto-plastic mechanical properties of bimetallic sheets

I. INTRODUCTION
With the rapid developments in the eld of material science, various advanced materials have been constantly fabricated. Those materials are usually composed of several dierent components and often exhibit some new macro mechanical properties. If the determination of the mechanical properties of the individual components from the mechanical responses of the global composite becomes possible, it would be helpful in designing new composites and structures with multiple components. However, most results about internal mechanical stresses and parameters, especially some material characteristic parameters, cannot be obtained directly by experimental measurements. Some studies on the parameter identication of composites by solving certain static or dynamic inverse problems have been reported[1, 2] . For example, Chen et al.[3] identied initial imperfection and strength parameters using a probabilistic progressive failure analyzing method. Ren et al.[4] evaluated the eect of damage nucleation parameters and pre-existing crack size on the failure stress and strain. Based on the measured real time signals of bird strike experiment and nite element numerical solutions, the structural parameters, training eciency and inverse precision of the network were studied[5] . Magorou et al.[6] carried out the simultaneous
Corresponding author. Email:tju ylkang@tju.edu.cn Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 10732080 and 10572102) and National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2007CB714000).

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identication of the bending/torsion rigidities by the resolution of an inverse problem. For identifying the parameters of inelastic constitutive equations, a method based on an evolutionary algorithm was proposed in Ref.[7]. Lin et al.[8] investigated the nonlinear damage behavior for the interfacial phase in a metal matrix composite by using a hybrid mythology of identication. Using a combined genetic algorithm and the nonlinear least squares method, elastic constants of composite and functional gradient plates were determined[9, 10] in accordance with their displacement values under dynamic loads. However, all these works took the composites as homogenous materials and focused only on the global linear parameters of the composites. In fact, a great number of composites possess nonlinear mechanical properties and the inverse identication of nonlinear mechanical properties of materials is more complicated than that of linear ones. Works of inverse identication of nonlinear parameters of homogenous materials have also been reported. A unied approach for parameter identication of inelastic material models in the frame of nite element method was presented in Ref.[11]. Isotropic and anisotropic plastic parameters were respectively identied in Refs.[12,13] by means of inhomogeneous tensile tests. An inverse approach for the study of the through-the-thickness variation of the plastic properties of a steel structure due to a heat treatment is proposed in Ref.[14]. Qu et al.[15] obtained viscoplastic parameters using an improved uniform random sampling method and a hybrid global optimization method. Wang et al.[16] identied interfacial mechanical properties of the adhesive bonded interface which are time-dependent in most engineering structures due to a novel hybrid/inverse identication method. Springmann and Kuna[17] presented a method for the identication of material parameters of inelastic deformation laws by using gradient based optimization procedures. Corigliano and Mariani[18] identied the parameters of a time-dependent elastic-damage interface model for the simulation of debonding in composites. The cyclic elastic-plastic parameters of sheet metals were identied from bending tests in Refs.[19,20]. Based on the Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman model, Springmann and Kuna[21] investigated the identication of the material parameters for the ductile structural steel. The inverse study for the determination of nonlinear properties of components in composites from the global nonlinear responses are more dicult due to the nonlinearity of materials as well as the increasing number of unknown parameters to be identied. The main goal of this investigation is to propose a new hybrid/inverse procedure for the identication of nonlinear mechanical properties of the individual component in composite materials. The inverse engineering problem for material characterization identication is solved by combining the experimental data, the mechanical model, the numerical calculation and the identication method. As an example, a set of elastic-plastic material parameters for a stainless steel clad copper sheet has been identied by this method. In addition, the identication results are veried and assessed by comparing with other independent experiments.

II. SCHEME OF HYBRID-INVERSE IDENTIFICATION OF NONLINEAR MECHANICAL PROPERTIES FOR BIMETALLIC SHEETS
It is recognized that most physical quantities such as internal mechanical stresses and material characteristic parameters cannot be obtained directly by experimental measurements. Those nally wanted quantities are then to be evaluated on the basis of measured deformations. This inevitably leads to a hybrid-inverse analysis, the solution of which demands appropriate mathematical/numerical algorithms combining with the experimental results. This paper attempts to determine the nonlinear mechanical properties of individual components in a bimetallic composite sheet from the global mechanical responses obtained through experiment measurement. It addresses the following aspects: (i) A set of parameters are employed to characterize the nonlinear mechanical properties of individual component metals in the bimetal sheet and thus a hybrid-inverse analysis of the nonlinear properties of the bimetal sheet are converted into a multi-parameter inverse identication problem based on the mechanical responses from experiments. (ii) Experimentation design. In order to determine the stress-strain response for the bimetallic sheet, at least two dierent types of experimental data of the mechanical response are required. In this research, pure bending and tensile experiment are used. (iii) Forward calculation. The conventional Mises yield function and the associated ow rule is used to describe the nonlinear mechanical behavior of metal materials.

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(iv) Minimization of the objective function is constructed, which represents the dierence between the experimental results and the results of numerical simulation. Thus the hybrid-inverse identication of elastic-plastic parameters is transformed into an optimization problem of minimizing the objective function. A gradient-based method is employed to minimize the objective function. The procedure of the present identication problem is schematically illustrated in Fig.1.

Fig. 1. Scheme of the material parameter identication for a bimetaalic sheet.

2.1. Experimentation In our experiments, the specimen used is a copper (type-T2) clad a stainless steel (type-304) sheet by explosive bonding and its dimensions are shown in Fig.2. In the pure bending test, a four-point bending test is carried out, as plotted in Fig.3. In the test, the length between B and C is set to 110 mm and d is 35 mm, so the moment M is uniform in z direction and of value . Furthermore, based on the assumption that the cross section remains plane during the test, the curvature of the specimen is determined from the surface strains measured by strain gauges bonded on both surfaces of the specimen and it is given by, where is the curvature, l and u denote the lower and upper surface strains respectively and h is

Fig. 2. Copper clad stainless steel specimen used in the experiments. Fig. 3. Schematic illustration of experimental setup for four-point bending test.

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the thickness of the specimen. The second type of experiment (uniaxial tension) produces the tensile load vs. strain curve. 2.2. Elasto-plastic Constitutive Model and Parameters to Be Identied In order to describe the stress-strain response of metals under monotonic increasing load, the strain increment d is decomposed into elastic and plastic components, del and dpl , as d = del + dpl , and the Mises yield condition for the isotropic hardening is q = 0 , where 0 is the yield stress and is dened as a function of equivalent plastic strain. The yield stress can be well determined if a plot of the uniaxial-stress vs. strain is available. In the present work, the uniaxial nonlinear stress-strain behavior of the two metals is assumed to follow the Ramberg-Osgood (R-O) relation[22] = + (Y /E ) Y Y
n

(1)

where E and Y are Youngs modulus and the initial yield stress, respectively, and and n two strain hardening parameters for the R-O curve. Then, the plastic strain is related to the stress according to the above equation as n1 pl = (2) E Y The above constitutive model incorporates ve material parameters: two elastic constants E (Youngs modulus) and (Poissons ratio); the initial yield stress Y ; and two R-O parameters and n for the isotropic hardening rule. Base on the above constitutive model, the nite element numerical calculation is employed to simulate the uniaxial tension and pure bending test of the bimetal sheet by software ABAQUS. The large-displacement formulation is used in the calculation of geometrically nonlinear behavior expected[23] .

III. HYBRID-INVERSE IDENTIFICATION FOR MATERIAL PARAMETERS BASED ON EXPERIMENTATION

In II above, the load-strain and the moment-curvature curves are obtained for the bimetallic sheet from the uniaxial tension and four-point bending test respectively. In the following, the elastic-plastic parameters of the component metals in the bimetallic sheet are identied by means of combining experimental results with the numerical calculation through an inverse approach. Let us consider the material parameters in a constitutive model to be identied as components of the vector x RN . Then the inverse problem of material parameter identication can be solved by an optimization approach and is formulated as follows: Find the vector x that minimizes the objective function J (x) =
L

J (x),

Ai xi Bi

(i = 1, 2, , N )

(3)

=1

where L is the total number of individual specic response quantities (denoted by ) which can be measured in the course of experiments and then obtained as a result of the numerical simulation. J (x) is the dimensionless function: J (x) = 1 S
S s=1 [Rs R (x, s )] ] [Rs 2 2

(4)

which measures the deviation between the computed individual response and the observed one from the experiment in which the notation denotes a parameter that denes the history of the process in the course of the experiment, S is the number of data points, s ( = 1, ..., L; s = 1, ..., S ) is the discrete values of for S -th data point, Rs is the value of the -th measured response quantity corresponding to the value of the experiment history parameter s , R (x, s ) is the value of the same response quantity obtained from the numerical simulation. is the weight coecient which determines the relative contribution of information yielded by the -th set of experimental data, Ai , Bi are the side constraints, stipulated by some additional physical considerations, which dene the search region in the space RN of optimization parameters.

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The unknown material parameters of the individual component metals in the bimetallic sheet are identied simultaneously in this work. The identication of the above material parameters, excluding Poissons ratio , which was found to be 0.28 and 0.35 for the stainless steel and the copper layers respectively from the conventional measurements, is performed using the tension (tensile load vs. strain: P vs. ) curve ( = 1) and the bending (bending moment vs. curvature: M vs. ) curve ( = 2) which are regarded as individual response quantities. In order to depress the ill poseness of the present inverse problem as well as to reduce the computational expenses, the elastic-plastic parameters are identied in two steps. As for the two Youngs module, they could be rst identied directly from elastic parts of P - and M - relationships. On the second step, the individual three plastic parameters of the two metals are identied from the nonlinear parts of the two curves. The identication process for the elastic-plastic model is described as follows: (i) in the identication of elastic parameters, the optimization variable are the Youngs module for the two layers: [Estainless steel , Ecopper]; in the identication of plastic parameters, the optimization variables x = {x1 , x2 , , x6 } are the plastic material parameters for the two layers: [(Y, , n)stainless steel , (Y, , n)copper ], (ii) the set of values of Rs are correlated to the set of values of the tensile load Rs = P (for = 1) and experimental bending moment Rs = M (for = 2). In the identication of elastic parameters both of Estainless steel and Ecopper are found from the linear part of the two experimental curves while in the identication of plastic material parameters, both sets of values are found from the nonlinear part of the two curves, (iii) the function R (x, s ) are obtained from the calculated tensile load (for = 1), and bending moment (for = 2), 1 2 (iv) the experiment history parameters s is the strain s in uniaxial tension for = 1; and s is the curvature s for = 2, and the index is 1 for the uniaxial tension, 2 for the four-point bending in Eqs.(3)-(4), (v) all the response quantities were considered equally weighted in the formulation of the objective function J (x). Gradient-based optimization methods are generally eective compared with direct search methods for inverse problems that include relatively more parameters to be identied. The specic form of the gradient-based method, employed in the present hybrid-inverse analysis, is based on the quasi-Newton algorithm with updating formula which builds up an approximation of the inverse of the Hessian matrix using the objective function values and its derivatives[24]. The derivatives of the objective function are approximated using nite dierence since their exact expressions are not explicitly known. It should be noted that diculty may arise in the minimization of the objective function J (x) in the identication of plastic parameters because of the dierent physical meanings and dimensions of the components of the vector x. The diculty can be raveled out by normalizing the problem. We rst dene the initial 0 values of the N material parameters as x0 = {x0 1 , , xN } and then the parameter vector x can be by setting x = D 1 x, D being the diagonal N N matrix transform into a dimensionless vector x is then dened by setting formed by the previous initial values. A new objective function J ( J x) = J (x) is in the form and the gradient of J ( J x) = D J (x) (5)

(6)

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The results of material parameters identied for both component metals are listed in Table 1. In order to check the accuracy of the hybrid-inverse procedure by these identied results, uniaxial tensile tests are performed on each metal layers taken from the bimetallic sheet by wire cutting processing, and the experimental stress-stain curves for both the stainless steel and the copper metals are obtained. The calculated stress-strain curves for the individual component metals via the material parameters identied above are compared with the experimental stress-strain curves in Fig.4. It should be noted that the results calculated with the identied parameters generally agree with those obtained from the experiments, though a certain discrepancy in the two results exists. There might be two main reasons

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for such a discrepancy between the experimental stress-strain curves and the calculated results shown in Figs.4. It is well known that the residual stress can be inevitably induced in each metal during the explosive bonding process and would aect the experimental results. Another possible reason for the discrepancy would be the less exibility of the three-parameter R-O model in describing the nonlinear behavior of the two metals.
Table 1. Identied material parameters in the elasto-plastic model for the bimetallic sheet

Stainless steel Copper

Youngs modulus E (GPa) 187.3 115.1

Initial yield stress Y (MPa) 284.5 134.3

R-O parameter 0.0416 0.0221

R-O parameter n 6.11 15.42

Fig. 4. Comparisons of the stress and strain curves in uniaxial tension test and the numerical simulation results by the constitutive models parameters for the stainless steel (SS) and aluminum (Copper) layers in the bimetallic sheet.

Fig. 5. Comparisons of the moment-curvature curves in the bending test and the numerical simulation by the constitutive models parameters for bimetallic sheet (It is a reversely placed with experiment in Fig.3).

For further check to the procedure and results in Table 1, another four-point bending test is carried out on a bimetallic specimen. In this experiment, the specimen is reversely placed on the testing machine with the stainless steel layer laid as the upper layer (a reversely placed with experiment in Fig.3). Figure 5 shows the numerical simulation for load-curvature during bending together with the corresponding experimental results. We can see that the simulated results agree well with those obtained in experiments. Hence, it indicates that the accuracy of the identied elastic-plastic parameters is acceptable and these identied parameters can be used for the prediction of the nonlinear mechanical responses of a bimetallic sheet under monotonically increasing load.

V. CONCLUSIONS
The present paper proposes a hybrid-inverse procedure to the identication of the nonlinear material parameters of the individual component layers in a bimetallic sheet using the experimental data from a whole bimetallic sheet. The problem is addressed by formulating the inverse characterization of nonlinear properties of composites as an optimization problem of minimizing objective functions. A gradient-based optimization method is used to solve the problem and the nonlinear mechanical properties of the individual component layers of the bimetallic sheet are identied simultaneously. The obtained numerical results indicate that the proposed hybrid-inverse procedure is suitable for identifying material parameters and can achieve acceptable accuracy for the elastic-plastic problems of bimetal composites. Acknowledgements The authors gratefully acknowledge Prof. Karl-Hans Laermann at Bergische University Wuppertal in Germany, for his useful help in the hybrid-inverse method.

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