A type of cruciform specimen applied to evaluate forming limits for boron steel under hot stamping conditions

The ultra-high strength boron steel has been intensively used in the hot stamping process to produce complex-shaped structural components in transportation industries. Forming limit diagram (FLD) is a fundamental and useful tool to evaluate the formability of metallic materials under various forming conditions. Since the standardized Nakajima test and Marciniak test are not applicable to perform formability tests for hot stamping applications due to the complex heating and cooling processes required, an in-plane testing method, in which cruciform specimens are deformed under hot stamping conditions in a Gleeble materials simulator combined with a multi-axial tensile rig to convert an input force to an output biaxial force, has been successfully applied to assess the formability of aluminium alloys at elevated temperatures. However, it is challenging to apply this in-plane testing method for boron steel due to higher nonuniformity of temperature distribution in gauge region of the cruciform specimen at a higher temperature. In this paper, a new type of cruciform specimen, together with a new specimen heating strategy, has been proposed to improve the temperature distribution in the gauge region. The dimensions of the newly-designed cruciform specimen have been optimised by a thermo-electrical finite element model embedded with a UAMP subroutine in ABAQUS to improve the uniformity of temperature distribution in the gauge region. In order to validate the new design of cruciform specimen, biaxial tensile tests were conducted under hot stamping conditions by using the in-plane testing method.