FEM Analysis of Advanced High Strength Steel Car Body Drawing Process

Advanced High Strength Steels (AHSS) have been intensively applied to automobile components to improve crashworthiness, without increasing the body weight, under a strong pressure of the requirements for fuel consumption, durability and energy absorption. Some of the problems encountered in the forming of AHSS, due to lack of knowledge about the material behaviour, are presented and described with the purpose of showing the necessity of sheet metal simulation to save cost and time by replacing physical tryouts with virtual tryouts. The codes and elements normally used in these types of simulation programs, as well as their common approaches, are presented and evaluated. Finally, a test case of an automobile component (hood structure) was analysed using the incremental approach of the AutoForm FEM code