Evaluation of the formability of 90/10 brass produced by different casting processes and investigation of the effect of Forming Limit Diagram determination procedure

The present work investigated the formability of 1.1 mm thick sheets of 90/10 brass (UNS C22000) alloy obtained by two different process routes: continuous casting (CC) and semi-continuous casting (SCC). Formability was accessed using forming limit diagrams determined by two different methodologies: one suggested by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC, with grooved tensile samples to access the deep-drawing side of the diagram) and the standard Nakazima procedure. Final microstructures are equivalent, consisting of equiaxed recrystallized grains, with a smaller grain size for the CC sheet. In spite of this, the obtained FLDs suggest that both sheets have equivalent formabilities, with some slight better performance observed for the SCC sheet. This inconsistency was discussed in terms of the recrystallization texture observed for both sheets.