Gekoppelte FEM-Berechnungen - Ein CAE Werkzeug zur Verbesserung von crashrelevanten Karosserieteilen durch lokales Härten

In the automotive industry, increasing demands for weight reduction as well a safety requirements have motivated the use of locally optimized components. This study shows how crash-relevant side rails made of multi-phase steels can be improved in terms of local rigidity by local hardening, thus avoiding an increase of the cross section. Based on the experiments, the improvement of crash simulations by simulation of the entire production chain is investigated. A dedicated software tool was developed to enable the coupling of a wide range of commercially available FEM software products for metal forming, heat treatment and crash simulations. One central aspect to be solved is the transfer of tensor-like quantities such as stress or strain states. This provides the first-time opportunity to consider the complete process chain from stamping to heat treatment to the final crash simulation.