No abstract

A Tailor-Welded Blank (TWB) is obtained by welding together sheets of same or different metals of different thicknesses to produce a single blank prior to subjecting it to a forming process. Some of the notable benefits of TWBs include decreased part weight, reduced manufacturing costs, increased environmental friendliness, and improved dimensional consistency. Designers nevertheless need to overcome the difficulty faced in the forming of TWBs due to material property changes in the two parent metal sheets, in the weld and heat affected zone of the weld. The purpose of the present work is to study the effect of changing thickness ratio on formability characteristics of TWBs made of aluminium and two different steels. Aluminium (AA6016-T4) blank sheet was combined with two high strength steels (HSLA-340 and DP600) with three thickness ratios(Steel/Al) of 1.0, 1.25 and 1.5 to form 6 different combinations. Rule of mixtures method is used for measuring the properties of laser weld metal in tailor welded blanks. The simulation results indicate that the weld line displacement tends to increase with the increase in the thickness ratio.

This paper deals with optimizing geometric parameters such as thickness ratio and weld line location, to minimize the movement of weld line during the stamping of tailor-welded blank (TWB) components. Weld line movement (WLM) is an important aspect to consider; otherwise, it leads to wrinkling and other forming-related problems. The major contributors to WLM are thickness ratio, weld line location, and strengths of the respective blanks. Selective heating is a recent technique adopted to reduce the material properties of the higher strength TWB blank by heating it locally, thus allowing a shift in the weld line. In this work, laboratory and simulation experiments were conducted under warm forming conditions on the TWB blanks. Experiments were also conducted by placing the weld line at an offset distance of ± 1 mm from the centre of blank. The situation is to choose the best possible value among thickness ratio and weld line location under the influence of selective heating to minimize the WLM. The objective function of WLM is obtained from the MINITAB statistical software by conducting ANOVA method. The optimum values of the parameters were obtained by minimizing the objective function.

No abstract