As part of efforts to reduce the weight of automotive body-in-white, a hybrid center pillar with high strength 7075 aluminum alloy (AA7075) sheet and carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) has been recently studied. In the fabrication of the AA7075-CFRP hybrid center pillar, the AA7075 sheet might go through heating-forming-in-die quenching (HFQ), artificial aging, hybridizing, and then paint baking processes. In this study, we investigate the effects of the heat treatment history associated with each process on the tensile strength of the AA7075 sheet. Typical heat treatment conditions are HFQ for 20 minutes at 480℃ and then cooling down with die, artificial aging of T6 temper for 24 hours at 120℃, hybridizing for 10 minutes at 150℃, and paint baking for 20 minutes at 180℃. The tensile strength of the AA7075 sheet is continuously increased by a series of heat treatments of hybridizing and paint baking and is expected to have yield stress above 500MPa without artificial aging of T6 temper.

This paper addresses the product shape modification for spring-back reduction in the sheet metal forming process of the cabin sunroof which is applied to the construction equipment. Initially, the anisotropic material properties are measured in order to calculate the degree of spring-back by the numerical simulation of the sheet metal forming process. To reduce the spring-back of the stamped part, several design modifications are suggested according to the geometrical bead arrangement on the planar region. The degrees of spring-back are confirmed for various product designs with different use of the geometrical bead. Finally, the spring-back improvement was validated by manufacturing the tryout product with the modified die set for the optimized product shape.

Stretch-flangeability, which is the ability of sheet steels to be deformed into complex shapes, is a critical formability property in automobile body parts. In this study, the center-hole for hole expansion test, which is normally used to evaluate the stretch-flangeability of sheet steels, was prepared by both punching and electrical discharge machining (EDM) methods. Hole expansion ratio (HER) of punched hole was far lower than the HER of EDM drilled hole because of damage/crack in hole-edge due to punching process. The effect of hole-edge condition on HER was quantified by mechanical, fractographic and geometric factors. Based on these factors, the empirical equation used to determine HER for various sheet steels was derived using non-linear regression.

In this paper, a parametric study on the influence of friction between materials on pull force in single clinching is conducted using an axisymmetric elasto-plastic finite element method and law of Coulomb friction. An appropriate finite element analysis model is given, which minimizes the effect of the material model and numerical factors including the number of quadrilateral finite elements and blank radius. It is emphasized that the elasto-plastic material model should be employed because the elastic deformation of the internal region is affected more by the pull force. It has been shown that the pull force increases as friction coefficient increases and that the optimized friction coefficient is around 0.4, which is qualitatively comparable with its theoretical value. When the friction coefficient reaches 0.5 in the example studied, the neck fracture is predicted.

The present study deals with the microstructure and mechanical properties of 700 MPa-grade high-strength seismic resistant reinforced steel bars fabricated by various TempCore process conditions. For the steel bars, in the surface region tempered martensite was formed by water cooling and subsequent self-tempering during TempCore process, while in the center region there was ferrite-pearlite or bainite microstructure. The steel bar fabricated by the highest water flow and the lowest equalizing temperature had the highest hardness in all regions due to the relatively fine microstructure of tempered martensite and bainite. In addition, the steel bar having finer microstructures as well as the high fraction of tempered martensite in the surface region showed the highest yield and tensile strengths. The presence of vanadium precipitates and the high fraction of ferrite contributed to the improvement of seismic resistance such as high tensile-to-yield strength ratio and high uniform elongation.