Enhanced Requirements for Surface Quality of Outer Car Body Shells According to Thermal Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

Challenging automotive design in the interaction of modern lightweight strategies to reduce car body weight as well as legislative regulations, impose higher requirements for future car body development. This trend leads to thinner sheet metal blanks and indicates higher requirements for narrow process windows in the entire manufacturing process to ensure the surface quality of outer shell panels. Especially, thermal loads within the coating process might cause local shape deviation in the startup phase of a new product. Further developments in multi-material-design for car body components induce material configurations with a complex deformation behavior due to different thermal expansion characteristics of the materials involved. For these reasons, there is a need to improve the prediction of the surface quality in the early car development process using numerical simulation methods. The influence of process parameters affecting the surface quality is shown and integrated into the process simulation.