COUPLED FEM CALCULATIONS - A CAE TOOL TO IMPROVE CRASH-RELEVANT AUTOMOTIVE BODY COMPONENTS BY LOCAL HARDENING

In the automotive industry, there is an increasing demand for weight reduction as well as safety requirements. These demands have motivated the use of locally optimized components. This study shows how local rigidity of crash-relevant side rails made of multi-phase steels can be improved by local hardening and thus avoiding an increase of the cross section. At the same time simulation process chains were completed and results validated by experiments. A dedicated software tool for the coupling of a wide range of commercially available FEM software products was developed. Codes for metal forming, heat treatment and crash simulations can now be used in one serial workflow. One major aspect here was the transfer of tensor-like values such as stress or strain states.