Evaluation of heterogeneous mechanical tests for model calibration of sheet metals

The accuracy of strategies combining heterogeneous mechanical tests and full-field strain measurement techniques is dependent on many factors. Recently, many heterogeneous mechanical tests with different specimen shapes have been proposed using optimization techniques or empirical knowledge. However, a comparison of heterogeneous mechanical tests is a difficult task because studies use different materials and different representations of the strain and stress states. This work discusses metrics, calculated from the stress and strain tensors, to evaluate heterogeneous mechanical tests and proposes a metric to evaluate the tests’ sensitivity to anisotropy. To illustrate the approach, four heterogeneous mechanical tests are evaluated through the use of the suggested metrics. Results show that the use of various metrics provides a good basis to evaluate heterogeneous mechanical tests. Moreover, this work identifies a heterogeneous mechanical test achieving a high range of mechanical states and high values of equivalent plastic strain.