Influence of specimen geometry and strain rate on elongation in tensile testing of packaging steel

Packaging steel is characterized by low thickness (0.1 mm – 0.5 mm) and ferritic microstructure resulting from low carbon contents. In combination with continuous annealing processes and temper rolling, this results in only little elongation observed in tensile tests. However, as in real forming processes much higher deformation occurs, it is important to receive true stress-true strain data up to a highest possible level e.g. to characterize material for finite element analysis. Therefore, tensile tests with three different measuring lengths (80 mm, 50 mm, 20 mm) were conducted for the packaging steel TH415. Likewise, the testing speed was reduced to investigate the possibility to receive more elongation under the condition of a constant stress level. The results revealed a significant increase in elongation when using smaller tensile test geometries. As well, the reduction in testing speed leads to much higher elongation while showing only little strain rate influence. While for the 80 mm geometry and standard speed no homogenous forming condition could be reached due to early failure before Lüders strain, this could be improved by using smaller testing specimens and a lower strain rate. Combining the influence of strain rate and geometry a significant increase of more than ten percentage points in elongation was reached.