Investigation on Effect of Slide Motion Control on Stamping of High Strength Steel Sheets

High strength steel sheets are increasingly used in automotive body parts with the aim of weight reduction, but their use urgently requires further improvement in sheet forming technology to overcome difficulties such as poor formability, dimensional inaccuracy, etc. On the other hand, servo press facilities are becoming increasingly used in industry and many attempts are being made to bring out their characteristic features for enhancing the formability of high strength steel sheets. Although some of these attempts have been successful in finding the advantages of servo presses for improving formability and dimensional accuracy, the mechanisms of such improvements have yet to be clarified in conjunction with the mechanical properties of the materials used. One of the most remarkable features of the servo press lies in its flexibility in slide motion control. It is thus effective to investigate the relevance of strain rate sensitivity of a material to the mechanism of improvement in formability enabled by the flexible slide motion of the servo press. However, very few studies have been carried out with material testing, material modeling, and numerical analyses combined with experimental verifications. In this study, Norton’s creep model was implemented in the FEM solver in order to take into account visco-elasto-plastic deformation including stress relaxation behavior. Parameters for the visco-elasto-plastic material model were identified through physical measurements and FEM simulations of uniaxial tension and crosshead displacement dwell tests, as shown in Fig. 1. The identified material model was applied to sheet forming simulations of an automotive body part and validity of the model was examined by comparing with stamping experiments using a servo press with a variety of slide motions. Numerical results with the identified material model showed the same tendency with respect to the slide motions as the experimental results. Stress relaxation behavior was found to be an important factor for improving formability enabled by modifying the slide motion.