Latest Developments in Automotive Bulb Shield Design and Manufacture

Bulb shields are important components in automotive headlamps. Like other automotive stamping industries, the design and forming of bulb are facing challenges, such as, aggressive styling and strict performance regulations versus the limitation of sheet formability, increasing cost versus intensive competition from offshore suppliers. Testing sheet formability at progressive speed, progressive forming bulb shield from Tailor-welded strip, predicting cosmetic appearance by conducting FEM simulation, roughness modeling and image database, reducing cost by building up global manufacturing structure are proposed to address the challenges in this study.