Process Design for Hydroformed Tailored Blanks Technology through CAE Techniques

Abstract

Ecological awareness and economic analysis force industry to decrease the weight of transportation vehicles and to achieve a higher product quality with a reduction of production costs [1]. Lightweight constructions made out of Tailored Blanks (TBs) and advanced manufacturing technologies, like sheet metal Hydromechanical Deep Drawing (HDD), help to reach these goals [1]. From this point of view, HDD techniques have been largely accepted by the industry [2] for the production of components characterized by: complex shapes, good surface quality and small residual stress. In this work, starting from previous studies of the same authors about hydroformed components with a redrawing area [3] [4], an original approach based on Thickness Percentage Reduction (TPR) distribution has been implemented to design a particular TBs for HDD applications. Numerical and experimental results about the studied test case have been allowed the verification of their correlation as well as the necessary reliability of the implemented process simulation methodology.