Abstract
The current market requirements are increasingly pushing the industry towards the manufacturing of highly customized products. Tailored blanks are a class of sheet metals characterized by the local variation of properties, attributable to the presence of different materials, different thickness distribution, and thermal treatments. In the manufacturing of tailored welded blanks, welding and forming processes cover a central role. In this framework, friction stir welding demonstrated to be a suitable candidate technology for the production by joining of tailored blanks. Indeed, sheet metals welded by this solid-state welding process typically exhibit high formability when compared to the conventional welding methods. Due to the improved formability, a good deal of attention has been recently given toward the single point incremental forming (SPIF) process and its integration with FSW. Remarkable efforts have been dedicated to the numerical modeling of the SPIF of metallic alloy sheets jointed by FSW. The main criticisms in these models are related to the definition of the mechanical properties of the materials, which are affected by the structural alteration induced by the FSW. The present work aims to model the local alterations in the mechanical properties and to analyze how these local characteristics affect the formability of the blanks. With this purpose, a 20 mm wide sample collected from a FS welded blank of aluminum alloy AA6082 has been modeled using the mechanical properties variation achieved in a previous work. The influence of this local variation in properties has been assessed using a Finite Element Model Updating strategy.
Highlights
Tailored blanks are a good solution for the increasing need expressed by the automotive and aerospace industries for efficient lightweight components [1]
The combination of fast heating, cooling down and the aforementioned plastic flows determine the typical microstructure of friction stir welding (FSW) joints composed of a nugget zone (NZ), a thermomechanically affected zone (TMAZ), a heat affected zone (HAZ), differing by the base material (BM) in the grain size and shape, and, in the mechanical properties [14]
The TMAZ corresponds with the sharp reduction of the microhardness
Summary
Tailored blanks are a good solution for the increasing need expressed by the automotive and aerospace industries for efficient lightweight components [1]. The combination of fast heating, cooling down and the aforementioned plastic flows determine the typical microstructure of FSW joints composed of a nugget zone (NZ), a thermomechanically affected zone (TMAZ), a heat affected zone (HAZ), differing by the base material (BM) in the grain size and shape, and, in the mechanical properties [14]. FSW blanks are often shaped by adopting the single point incremental forming (SPIF) process [18,19,20] It is a moldless process based on the local action of a forming tool driven by common CNC systems or robotic arms [21]. The present work aims to compare the mechanical behavior of FSW aluminum AA 6082 blanks welded adopting different tool rotational speed (TRS) and welding speed (WS) in butt joint configuration. The models, implemented using the ABAQUS suite integrated with several user subroutines, aim to simulate the stressstrain response in the tensile testing of coupons collected from FSW blanks transversally to the welding line direction
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