A Pragmatic Strategy to Take into Account Metal Materials Scatter in FEA

Since years, FEA tools have allowed to reduce development time of products. Main improvements have been done in hardware and software leading to the possibility of finer mesh and complete models of complex structures. In parallel, material science did strong efforts to develop material models able to take into account accurately anisotropy, strain rate sensitivity, failure and damage. These give to FEA methodology sufficient maturity to run DOE in a robust design approach. One of the main inputs is the material properties and associated scattering from production which can not be avoided. Automotive industry has also become a global worldwide business. Same cars can be produced on several continents with different local suppliers of raw materials. Some slight changes in material properties can occur for a given metallurgical family depending on local material standards. However, only few researches have been done yet on scatter modelling, which is still crucial for designers to assess quickly the reliability of their design. We present here a pragmatic and economic approach to take into account material scattering in Finite Element Simulations with the example of flow curve according to the change of basic mechanical properties for metals. Good partnership between metals suppliers and carmakers is key for success. The output is a set of flow curves ready to be used as an input of optimizing FEA software.