After a brief introduction into crystal plasticity,the fun- damentals of crystallographic textures and plastic anisotro- py, a main topic of this book, are outlined. A large chapter is devoted to formability testing both for bulk metal and sheet metal forming. For the first time testing methods for plastic anisotropy of round bars and tubes are included. A profound survey is given of literature about yield criteria for anisotropic materials up to most recent developments and the calculation of forming limits of anisotropic sheet me- tal. Other chapters are concerned with properties of workpieces after metal forming as well as the fundamentals of the theory of plasticity and finite element simulation of metal forming processes. The book is completed by a collection of tables of international standards for formability testing and of flow curves of metals which are most commonly used in metal forming. It is addressed both to university and industrial readers.

The concept of virtual manufacturing has been developed in order to increase the industrial performances, being one of the most ef cient ways of reducing the m- ufacturing times and improving the quality of the products. Numerical simulation of metal forming processes, as a component of the virtual manufacturing process, has a very important contribution to the reduction of the lead time. The nite element method is currently the most widely used numerical procedure for s- ulating sheet metal forming processes. The accuracy of the simulation programs used in industry is in uenced by the constitutive models and the forming limit curves models incorporated in their structure. From the above discussion, we can distinguish a very strong connection between virtual manufacturing as a general concept, ?nite element method as a numerical analysis instrument and constitutive laws,aswellas forming limit curves as a speci city of the sheet metal forming processes. Consequently, the material modeling is strategic when models of reality have to be built. The book gives a synthetic presentation of the research performed in the eld of sheet metal forming simulation during more than 20 years by the members of three international teams: the Research Centre on Sheet Metal Forming—CERTETA (Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania); AutoForm Company from Zürich, Switzerland and VOLVO automotive company from Sweden. The rst chapter presents an overview of different Finite Element (FE) formu- tions used for sheet metal forming simulation, now and in the past.