Project Team
Students
Jeremy Fischer
Mechanical Engineering
Penn State DuBois, Penn State Behrend
Faculty Mentors
Chetan Nikhare
Penn State Behrend
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Todd Palmer
Penn State University Park
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Project
Project Video
Project Abstract
In the automotive industry, there is a considerable pressure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by reducing the amount of steel in vehicles. The industry is researching ways to reduce weight and improve fuel consumption for their vehicles, while still maintaining the safety and engineering requirements. Currently, the industry uses mild steels that have a large deformation capacity but are limited to having lower strength. As a result, mild steel is primarily used for the bodies of vehicles and no other applications. A higher ductility and strength option would be advanced high strength steels (AHSS), such as DP and TRIP. However, AHSS steels are limited in the automotive industry due to the challenges in forming, tool life, sheet metal coupling, and springback behavior.
The springback is the main problem with AHSS steels, which compromises the mass-production of automotive structural components. Various articles relating to heat treatments and other effects of young’s modulus degradation have been thoroughly analyzed to produce a review based on the effects of how the microstructure of the material affects the elastic modulus. The results indicate that the elastic modulus degrades more significantly with respect to pre-strain, decreases with respect to the orientation of the rolling direction, and decreases as ferrite volume fraction decreases or when the austenite volume fraction increases. Further research into this topic can allow various high strength steels to be introduced into the automotive industry, as well as understand the elastic recovery behavior during the forming process. This data can be then fed to numerical model to predict the springback behavior and correction can be engineered in the during stamping.
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