Effects of Texture on Mechanical Properties of Aluminum Alloy Sheets and Texture Optimization Strategy.

It is known that the crystallographic texture affects very much the mechanical properties of sheet metals. In this paper, rolled aluminum alloy sheets are considered as target materials. Typical texture components usually observed in rolled aluminum alloy sheets are the deformation textures of Cu, Brass and S, and the recrystallization textures of Cube and Goss. First, the effects of these components on mechanical properties, such as variations of Lankford’s r-value for different tensile directions and forming limit strains, are investigated using full crystal plasticity analyses. In general, the most appropriate volume fractions of the texture components for a user-defined particular requirement, e.g. the smallest possible in-plane anisotropy, or the largest possible formability for a particular strain path, are unknown. Then, a texture optimization strategy is considered, i.e. a genetic algorithm is adopted to solve texture optimization problems. We describe a genetic algorithm with real-valued genes, which is called the real-coded GA. This algorithm is used to search for optimum textures that satisfy the requirements of smallest possible in-plane anisotropy and largest possible formability in biaxial stretch, as examples, to verify the efficiency of the method. © 2005 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]