The Study of Roller Hemming Process for Aluminum Alloy via Finite Element Analysis and Experimental Investigations

Recently the automotive industry faces many competitive challenges including weight and cost reduction to meet the needs for high fuel efficiency. Therefore, the use of light metals such as aluminum alloys has been increased to produce the body structure of light-weight vehicles. However, since the formability of aluminum alloy is not as good as that of steel, it needs a special attention to body manufacturer during their forming process. Roller hemming technology has been introduced as a new production technique which has several advantages in terms of cost and time saving for trial and error. Since hemming is the last forming process in stamping, it determines the external quality of automotive outer parts such as doors, hood and trunk-lid. In this study, the implicit finite element analysis of roller hemming process on the flat surface-straight edge panel was performed by using the commercial code ANSYS. This study shows the process of roller hemming simulation with Von Mises stress and effective strain results. In addition, experimental investigations have been done to compare the results between the simulation and experiment.