Elevated temperature forming of high strength aluminum automotive structural components

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The proposed research will address barriers to the utilization of high strength 6000- and 7000-series aluminum sheet alloys within light weight automotive structural components. These alloys offer tremendous weight reduction potential due to their high specific strength compared to conventional steels; however, their limited formability makes it difficult to manufacture required complex shapes. Warm forming is often considered to overcoming the low formability of aluminum; however, for these alloys there would be a resulting loss of their desirable high strength characteristics. The proposed research will consider two processing routes to overcome these issues: (i) warm forming of under-aged 6000-series alloys; and (ii) die quenching and aging of solutionized 7000-series alloys. Fundamental thermo-mechanical studies will identify promising processing routes, while elevated temperature formability and component-scale stamping experiments will prove out the processes. The crashworthiness of structural components fabricated using these processing routes will be assessed directly using large-scale impact experiments. Numerical models of the high strain rate constitutive behavior of these alloys in the as-processed condition will be developed and used to simulate the impact experiments. The final outcome of this research will be commercial processing routes to fabricate high strength, light weight automotive structural components for rapid commercialization by our industry partners, Honda, Magna and Alcoa.