Forming, press hardening and welding are a well-established production processes in manufacturing industry, but predicting the finished geometry and the final material properties of the processed parts is still a major issue. In particular, deformations caused by welding are often neglected in the virtual process chain, although they have to be compensated for in order to fulfill the requirements on shape tolerance. This presentation will give an overview on novel features of LS-DYNA implemented particularly for welding simulations.To begin with, new keywords will be presented that allow applying the heat generated by the weld torch. LS-DYNA offers a very convenient way to define the well-known Goldak heat source, but it is also possible to define arbitrarily shaped torch geometries.In order to obtain a predictive model for welding simulations, specific material models have been devised in LS-DYNA. The properties of filler material in weld seams are accounted for by a ghost material approach. Material is initialized as ghost material and is activated, i.e. it is given base material properties, when the temperature reaches the melting point. This approach has been implemented for a relatively simple thermo-elasto-plastic material formulation *MAT_CWM as well as for the more complex material law *MAT_UHS_STEEL. The latter has initially been implemented for press hardening simulations and is able to predict the microstructure of steel alloys including phase transformations and the resulting mechanical properties.In this contribution, details of the material formulations and novel features are presented. Examples will demonstrate how these features can be applied to multistage processes including several forming and welding stages.

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High manganese content TWinning Induced Plasticity (TWIP) steels are promising for the production of lightweight components due to their high strength combined with extreme ductility, see [1]. This paper deals with the implementation of a constitutive model for the macroscopic deformation behavior of TWIP steels under mechanical loading with the aim of simulating metal forming processes and representing the behavior of TWIP-steel components – for example under crash loading - with the Finite Element code LS-DYNA®and refers to our recently published papers: [2],[4],[5]. Within the present paper we focus on the implementation of the model formulated in [2] and its extension to stress dependent twinning effects.

Due to their high strength (tensile strength > 1GPa) in combination with an extreme ductility (failure strain 30-50%) TWinning Induced Plasticity–steels (TWIP-steels) can be considered as promising materials for the production of lightweight automotive components. The industrial application of TWIP-steels requires a fundamental experimental validation of the mechanical behavior as basis for an user-friendly but at the same time accurate constitutive framework and its implementation into commercial Finite Element codes. Related investigations and implementations in order to allow for the simulation of TWIP-steel forming processes are currently conducted within the research project “TWIP4EU”, executed as a cooperation of Fraunhofer - Institut für Werkstoffmechanik IWM in Freiburg (Germany), Salzgitter Mannesmann Forschung GmbH (Germany), Swerea KIMAB (Sweden), Faurecia Autositze GmbH (Germany / France), DYNAmore GmbH (Germany) and ESI GmbH Engineering System (Germany / France).The monotonic one-dimensional hardening behavior of TWIP-steels as a function of the twin volume fraction and dislocation density has been described by Bouaziz et al. (2008), Bouaziz et al. (2011). This model has been proven to be adequate for the description of the flow behavior of TWIP-steels and serves as basis for the constitutive model, presented here. This Bouaziz-model has been extended to a three-dimensional elasto-plastic formulation, including the influence of different loading conditions, anisotropy and kinematic hardening. The present paper deals with the implementation for solids and shells in the commercial Finite Element Code LS-DYNA®and appropriate validation simulations will be presented.

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