A novel forming technology for tailor-welded blanks

摘要

A promising approach to reducemanufacturing costs, decrease vehicle weight, andimprove the quality of automotive body components isthrough the use of tailor-welded blanks. This termrefers to blanks where multiple sheets of material arewelded together to create a single blank prior to theforming process. The welding process createsformability concerns in a traditional forming processdue to material property changes in the weld and in theheat-affected zone adjacent to the weld. In this paper, anewly contrived clamping method along the weld lineof the tailor-welded blank during forming is proposed.Numerical simulation results demonstrate theeffectiveness and feasibility of the proposed technology,which reduced the maximum strains along the weldline by approximately one-fifth in the part examined.