A study on forming the tailor welded T-section

Abstract

Tears and wrinkles were generated during the forming of a B-pillar, a component of the automotive sideframe. Employing tailor-welded blanks in the B-pillar, a stretch flanging condition gave rise to such forming problems as tearing along the weld bead. The authors simplified B-pillar lower part to a T shaped section to investigate the forming behaviors of the tailor-welded blanks. The effects of the weld line locations and the section end shapes on tearing and wrinkling were studied by way of finite element simulations and several experiments. An appropriate weld bead modeling technique was selected producing a deformation pattern similar to those of the experiments. The concept of the counter-punch was introduced to eliminate body wrinkles.