Experimental investigations of the material behavior of Ti6Al4V titanium alloy

Computer models are widely used to support the development of conventional design methods based on expensive full-scale tests or trial and error methods. Nevertheless, in order to accurately model metal forming processes as well as structural behavior of load carrying elements, it is necessary to afford an accurate knowledge of the material properties. Titanium is one of the material for which various industrial sectors such as aerospace or biomedical are showing an increasing interest. This paper presents the experimental tests performed on the titanium based alloy Ti6Al4V to investigate on its mechanical behavior, especially in terms of its anisotropy and hardening. For that purpose, a classical uniaxial and a non-standard biaxial experimental equipments designed by Florès in the Materials and Structures Mechanics Laboratory of the University of Liège have been used to perform tensile, simple shear and cyclic shear tests as well as successive simple shear and plane strain tests, which provide the main contribution of this paper in the form of stress-strain curves.