Manufacturing of process adapted tailored blanks by flexible rolling process using aluminum alloy AA6016

摘要

Sheet-bulk metal forming is an innovative process class to meet the challenge of manufacturing lightweight functional components with high mechanical properties. By using a flexible rolling process, which is presented in this paper, semi-finished products with defined volumetric material pre-distributions can be manufactured for achieving a sufficient die filling of functional elements in subsequent forming processes. Due to the low density of aluminum, this material also offers high potentials for lightweight construction. However, the lower formability of aluminum compared to steel materials has to be considered for such processes. For this reason, the influence of manufacturing tailored blanks with a defined material pre-distribution made of the aluminum alloy AA6016 by a flexible rolling process was analysed regarding their resulting blank properties as well as the machine forces.