Determining tearing concerns in numerical simulations of sheet metal components is difficult since the traditional failure criterion is strain-based and exhibits strain path dependence. Recently, a stress-based, as opposed to a strain-based, failure criterion has been proposed and demonstrated both analytically for sheet materials (Arrieux, 1987 and Stoughton, 2001) and experimentally for tube hydroforming (Kuwabara et al., 2003). The next steps in this progression to acceptance of a stress-based forming limit diagram is to demonstrate how this failure criterion can be used to predict failure of sheet metal parts in numerical simulations. In this paper, numerical simulation results for dome height testing specimens are presented and compared to experimental data from Graf and Hosford (1993). Reasonable agreement was obtained comparing the failure predicted from numerical simulations and those found experimentally.
