Comparison of Localized Deformation in Crystal Plasticity Based Finite Element Simulations between Experimentally Measured and Statistically Generated Three-Dimensional Microstructures for the Aluminum Alloy 5754

This paper presents three dimensional (3D) grain structure of AA5754-O aluminum sheet collected by serial sectioning using a Dual Beam Focused Ion Beam equipped with Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) to enable an evaluation of the necessity for obtaining real 3D microstructures instead of generating 3D microstructures from 2D data using statistically equivalent microstructure generation techniques. A volume of 45.5x51x33 mu m material is sampled to construct the 3D microstructure and the corresponding equivalent 3D microstructure is generated using M-builder. These data sets are processed to build FE meshes containing real grain morphology and orientation. FE simulations of deformation fields using rate dependant crystal plasticity theory are conducted on both the real and generated microstructures and the predicted Forming Limit Diagrams (FLD's) for the two microstructures are compared with the experimental FLD from the same alloy AA5754. Significant differences are observed between the two microstructures.