Activities of a Material Supplier to Support the Virtual Manufacturing Process with Respect to Robust Forming Simulations

The trend to a digital product and production development is an ever increasing activity of most automotive companies. Crash and forming processes are handled on a daily basis, other activities are also continuously realized. Examples for these simulations are the drying process in the paint shop, digital mock up, durability, stiffness and acoustics. All these fields of activity call for specific material models and their input parameters in order to guarantee a valuable result. It is essential to a material supplier that the simulation results are in accordance with a final real world experience. A beneficial property of a material has, on a long term view, to be included in the modeling to allow a skilled engineering process and to exhaust all capabilities. The special field of forming simulation is a good example for this process and has become a sustainable portion of part production today. During the last years numerous efforts have been made by universities, software companies, material suppliers and the automotive industry to generate a valuable and trusted process. In so doing the amount of parameters needed to allow a final statement for production has exploded. This is especially true for the amount of material parameters to be fed in a final simulation run for any robustness interpretation. The demand for the simulation results varies with the time of application and the actual goal of the investigation targeted by simulations. The simple die design phase requires a fast and reliable forming simulation process. A support for production processes problems requires a statement for the influence of mostly unknown relevant parameters such as process robustness, material scatter, friction behavior and press dynamics and speeds. As a leading material supplier for automotive steels, ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe AG accompanies this virtual production process. The implementation of existing and new materials into the different phases of process development is supported by own research activities for testing methods, standardizations, numerical methods and for powerful tools to permit a faster material card calibration.