Impact crash tests of high-strength steels using 3D high-speed digital image correlation and finite element analysis

The automotive industry is currently adapting to a new reality, where anthropogenic emissions need to decrease significantly. To meet present and future demands of vehicle design, press harden-ing techniques to produce complex geometries with high strength and ductility as well as good precision are of great interest. New generations of hot forming steels enable both further weight reductions by using thinner sheets as well as better crash performance due to its ability to improve the structural integrity of the body-in-white. To promote the use of these new steel grades, it is important to study their performance using well-instrumented lab scale test of full-scale compo-nents. Since these tests are often time consuming and expensive, calibrating constitutive models with tensile specimens and using finite element analysis is a more cost-effective alternative. How-ever, these calibrated models should be validated against full-scale experiments to verify their effectiveness in predicting the material behaviour in complex crash environments. In this paper, a high-speed 3D digital image correlation experiment is performed on a crash box under axial com-pression. The material is a hot forming steel grade with a specified tensile strength of 1000 MPa. The axial crash tests are modelled based on a visco-plastic model calibrated by high-speed tensile tests. The computed results in terms of force response and obtained deformations agree well with the corresponding measurements