Tailored welded blanks - an experimental and numerical study in sheet metal forming on the effect of welding

Tailored welded blanks allow the combination of different materials and different sheet thicknesses in a single blank, thus letting designers and engineers to fit, in initial blank, local needs of strength or other demands in the stamped component. The selection of the best material combination for a part involves a high number of parameters associated with the technologies used in industry. Sheet metal forming technology is widely used to obtain different type of parts. In these processes a large amount of plastic deformation is generally imposed to the sheet. The complexity of the plastic deformation has lead to the development of numerous techniques to predict or evaluate the formability of the raw materials. In the last few years, important developments have been achieved, based on new theoretical models and experimental validation. In this paper two experimental benchmarks are used to evaluate the ability of tailored welded blanks in the drawing process. In addition, the numerical simulation of such examples was performed and the comparison with experimental results is also presented. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.