Zum Stand der virtuellen Werkstoffentwicklung: Vom Halbzeug zum Crash

Due to environmental aspects in automotive industry weight reduction of body parts is one of the main challenges. Increase of safety and comfort requirements accompanied by decrease of weight leads to the necessity of complex construction and application of innovative steel in car part production. The implementation of innovative steel grades is delayed in market introduction due to difficulties in production and processing of these steels. To overcome this problem, Salzgitter Mannesmann Research GmbH, Daimler AG, Kirchhoff automotive GmbH, DYNAmore GmbH, Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM and Max- Planck Institute for Iron Research GmbH started a joint research project which is founded by the German Federal Ministry of Education in 2006. The goal of this project is the acceleration of the development and market introduction of new steel grades. Within this project, a simulation strategy for modelling the process chain of dual phase steels from hot rolled strip to the behaviour of components under crash conditions was developed. These tools permit to take into account local changes of the microstructure during the process to consider their influence on the mechanical properties on macroscopic level and to transfer the relevant data from step to step along the whole process chain. Different length scales are applied for an adequate data structure of each simulation model. For example, numerical homogenization of the microstructure properties to provide a macroscopic material description is carried out by a so-called “Virtual lab”. The developed process chain simulation, allows steel manufacturers a fast and purposeful modification of the process parameters and thus of material properties. Consequently, application of the process chain simulation enables an enormous time and cost reduction during the introduction of new steels into the automotive market.