Mass production-line and process route to enable the use of high strength aluminium alloy materials in car body engineering

Abstract

Hot stamping of sheet metal materials provides advantages such as application for mass production lines and net shape manufacturing at economical cost. Recent regulations by governments world-wide on environment, emission controls and safety determine the need to provide complete lightweight solutions in the transport industry particularly for the automotive sector. These regulations are influencing multi-material-design concepts in automotive body engineering and the use of high strength aluminium alloy materials: 6xxx and 7xxx series in the development of electric and non-electric vehicles. The use of high strength aluminium alloy materials to manufacture car body parts is increasing in the lightweight solutions mainly due to weight-strength ratio advantage. Due to different material behaviours such as formability and strengthening mechanism, compared with high strength steel alloys, an industrial proven redefined hot forming process route, HForm™ will be needed to ensure high productivity and return on investment in the manufacture of parts using the aluminium alloys sheets. The produced parts will also satisfy functional requirements in the automotive industry such as surface quality, tight tolerances, strength, crashworthiness, corrosion resistance as well as ease-to join in the body-in-white (BiW) structure and e-coat. However to implement the HForm™ process and manufacture functional automotive body parts requires dedicated furnace for aluminium alloy materials, intermediate cooling station, handling/transport systems, a servo hydraulic press, and coated dies with integrated lubricant metering system. Presented in this paper is a complete solution to enable paradigm-shift in the car body engineering.