Forming of Aluminum Tailor Welded Blanks

Tailor welded blanks offer an excellent opportunity to reduce manufacturing costs, decrease vehicle weight, and improve the quality of sheet metal stampings. However, tearing near the weld seam is a concern in Tailor Welded Blanks due to material changes in the fusion and heat affected zones of the weld. Therefore, data is required such as the potential strain of the material in these areas to use in the process design. For example, Cao and Kinsey proposed a modification to the deep drawing process where segmented dies with local adaptive controllers clamp adjacent to the weld line during the forming operation thereby reducing the strain in the material near the weld seam and in turn the concern of tearing failure. In order to aid in the design process for this modification, an understanding of the effects of the welding process on material changes near the weld seam is essential. In this paper, Limit Dome Height data for aluminum 5182-H00 is presented to provide the potential principle strain in the material as well as initial experimental implementation results of the proposed process modification on a non-symmetric test panel verifying the potential strain results from the Limit Dome Height tests.