A novel forming technology for tailor-welded blacks

A promising approach to reduce manufacturing costs, decrease vehicle weight, and improve the quality of automotive body components is through the use of tailor-welded blanks. This term refers to blanks where multiple sheets of material are welded together to create a single blank prior to the forming process. The welding process creates formability concerns in a traditional forming process due to material property changes in the weld and in the heat-affected zone adjacent to the weld. In this paper, a newly contrived clamping method along the weld line of the tailor-welded blank during forming is proposed. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed technology, which reduced the maximum strains along the weld line by approximately one-fifth in the part examined. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.