Characterizing Al tailor-welded blanks for automotive applications

The application of aluminum tailor-welded blanks offers significant potenti al for reducing the weight of future automobiles, and improvements are bein g made in the development and understanding of the welding process. There a re several geometric and infernal weld features that make the complete nume rical description of tailor-welded blank forming challenging. The variation of the experimental formability results found in the literature for alumin um tailor-welded blanks appears to be large, and a combined theoretical ten sile instability and statistical analysis of internal weld porosity may exp lain at feast some of the variation reported.