Influence of the weld on the mechanical behaviour of tailor welded blanks

In new car production, an innovative method to produce strong and light panels consists in applying Tailor Welded Blanks (TWBs) in the body-in-white base structure. Since the fusion welding processes can induce significant changes in the material properties of the base materials, an important question is whether the weld bead has a significant influence on the overall behaviour of the welded blanks. In this work, some preliminary conclusions on this subject were achieved based on results of the numerical simulation of simple mechanical tests: tensile, shear and simple bending. The numerical simulations were performed with a fully implicit finite element program (DD3IMP). The results obtained show that for a slight mismatch of properties between the weld and the base materials, no important influence of the weld in the TWBs behaviour is noticed. However, a significant strength reduction can be observed for strong undermatch conditions (lower mechanical properties in the weld) even when the weld bead is very narrow.