Anisotropic work hardening of steel sheets under plane stress

This work is a follow-up of the previous report by Kim and Yin [Kim, K.H., Yin, J.J., 1997. Evolution of anisotropy under plane stress. J. Mech. Phys. Solids 45, 841–851] regarding the anisotropic work hardening of cold rolled steel sheets. Tensile prestrain has been applied at angles to the rolling direction and then tensile uniaxial yield stress and R-value distributions are measured. As reported earlier, the orientations of local maxima and minima in the yield stress are altered when the prestrain axis is not in the rolling direction. This led Kim and Yin [Kim and Yin (1997)] to suggest that the orientations of orthotropy axes are altered by the tensile prestrain at angles to the rolling direction. However, R-value distribution is found to be hardly affected by the prestrain. The unchanging R-value distribution shows that the material remembers the rolling direction even after the prestrain. An attempt is made to approximate the observed yield and flow behavior based upon isotropic-kinematic hardening with the quadratic yield function (Hill, 1948). The degree of approximation raises the issues of yield point definition, flexibility of yield function, non-associated flow rules, distortional hardening and others.