Enhanced vehicle light weighting and safety through tailored hot stamping

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The proposed research will address the fundamental material characterization and model development required to introduce tailored hot stamping processes to fabricate automotive crash energy-absorbing frontal structure components. Hot stamping has been adopted extensively to fabricate side impact protective structures (b-pillars, side sills, door beams) due to the inherent ultra-high strength (1,500 MPa) resulting from this process. The current research will consider tailoring of hot stamped components thereby introducing local softer regions of high strength (up to 1,000 MPa) but greater ductility, thereby enabling this process to produce components able to absorb crash energy in local "tailored" regions. The research will characterize the local microstructure, properties and failure characteristics of properties of parts tailored using: (i) in-die (IDH) heating to control local quench rates and resulting properties; and, (ii) tailor welded blanks (TWBs). Numerical models of the crash behaviour of these two classes of tailored parts will be developed. As a final validation, a demonstrator structure will be developed that captures the frontal crash response of a commercial front end structure. The front rail component will be replaced with a light weighted version fabricated using tailored hot stamping. The crash response of this structure will be measured and the model predictions will be assessed/validated against the experiments.