Deep drawing simulations of Tailored Blanks and experimental verification

Tailored Blanks are increasingly used in the automotive industry. A combina tion of different materials, thickness, and coatings can be welded together to form a blank for stamping car body panels. The main advantage of using Tailored Blanks is to have specific characteristics at particular parts of the blank in order to reduce the material weight and costs. To investigate the behaviour of Tailored Blanks during deep drawing, the finite element co de DiekA is used. In this paper, simulations of the deep drawing of two pro ducts using Tailored Blanks are discussed. For verification, the two produc ts are stamped to gain experimental information. The correlation between th e experimental results and the simulation results appears to be satisfactor y. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.