FEM analysis of advanced high strength steel car body drawing process
Advanced High Strength Steels (AHSS) have been intensively applied to automobile components to improve crashworthiness, without increasing the body weight, under a strong pressure of the requirements for fuel consumption, durability and energy absorption. Some of the problems encountered in the forming of AHSS, due to lack of knowledge about the material behaviour, are presented and described with the purpose of showing the necessity of sheet metal simulation to save cost and time by replacing physical tryouts with virtual tryouts. The codes and elements normally used in these types of simulation programs, as well as their common approaches, are presented and evaluated. Finally, a test case of an automobile component (hood structure) was analysed using the incremental approach of the AutoForm FEM code.
Using the virtual simulation the advantages in cost and time are given by a 50% reduction of the physical mock-ups realisation that are presently used only in the final verification phase and not any more in the initial stage of the design procedure. The actual goal is the complete elimination of the physical mock-ups with corresponding further cost and time saving
Soliman Al-Azraq
Have you been able to evaluate quantitatively the savings achieved in terms of time and cost by incorporating drawing process simulations in the design stage?
Emmanuel Brousseau