Parameter study on press hardened components with tailored properties

In automotive industry, crash relevant parts are mainly manufactured by press hardening. An innovative process variant aims at producing components with tailored properties. For this purpose, the microstructural transformation is locally influenced to produce areas with lower strength. Hence, the forming tool is locally equipped with heating elements. Due to the non-uniform temperature distribution, the final part geometry results from a complex interaction of localized spring back, shrinkage and microstructure evolution. To achieve high geometric accuracy, a strong focus lies on the implementation of appropriate process parameters. A parameter study is performed in order to identify those process parameters, which mainly influence component distortion of a top hat profile. An automated test setup with a locally heated press hardening tool is used. As a result, the achieved hardness values and the geometric deviations are presented in dependence of the main influencing parameters.