Investigation of diffusion behavior of carburized sheet metal in hot stamping

Abstract

Today, manufacturing of structural car body parts faces several challenges, like forming accuracy, passenger safety and lightweight design. One possibility to fulfill these partially rivalling demands is the application of hot stamped components. The combination of hot forming and in-die quenching reduces not only springback, but also results in tensile strengths of more than 1500 MPa. Besides conventional hot stamping, the process can be adapted to manufacture parts with tailored properties. One of the biggest issues of these state-of-the-art processes is the formation of extensive transition zones due to heat transfer. A promising approach to adjust the mechanical properties with a minimized transition zone is tailored carburization of sheet metal. Therefore, the parts are locally coated with graphite, heat treated and subsequently quenched. In this work, the time variant process of carbon diffusion is investigated. Sheets with two different thicknesses are carburized and quenched. The resulting mechanical properties are analyzed using uniaxial tensile tests and microhardness measurements. On this basis, a process window is identified. Furthermore, the applicability of EDX and WDX analysis for the measurement of carbon concentration is investigated within this work.