Great article on hot stamping by Mike Austin of Diversified Tooling Group, It concisely covers the challenges associated with hot forming and shows why it is so much more complex than conventional cold stamping. Problems from friction appear differently in hot stamping- because there is a different root cause, there is a different corrective action. Free flow of metal into the cavity minimizes friction, but the critical cooling rate is [...]
A slideshow of photos taken at I-CAR’s booth at SEMA 2018 is at the bottom of an article containing information about AHSS content in 2019/2020 vehicles. These photos highlight sections of the 2019 Silverado body, showing several parts labeled with strength levels and grade. You can see several 780MPa and 980MPa steel parts, as well as some UHSS parts. GMs strategy on their new truck is to use 6XXX aluminum [...]
NSSMC (Nippon-Sumitomo) and JFE Steel jointly developed a cold formable steel having a minimum tensile strength of 1300MPa. The first production application is the 2019 Mazda 3, where it is used for the front pillar inner, roof rail inner, hinge pillar reinforcement, roof rail reinforcement, side sill inner reinforcement, and the No. 2 crossmember. Mazda expects to use this throughout their lineup. No doubt that joining and repair techniques need [...]
SSAB has a good post on why tensile test elongation is not the best way to assess formability of AHSS steel. It has to do with averaging deformation over a large gauge length. Coincidentally, I've written about this in an article to be published in the February 2019 issue of MetalForming Magazine. Read more from SSAB in their article, The Forming Myth -Danny Schaeffler, www.EQSgroup.com and www.Learning4M.com
