ToughSteel partners David Frómeta, project coordinator and researcher from Eurecat’s Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit, and Daniele de Caro, Sheet metal group responsible from Centro Richerche Fiat, have delivered a presentation about a new modelling approach to predict edge cracking in Advanced High Strength Steels (AHSS) at the Materials in Car Body Engineering 2022 conference, hosted by Automotive Circle. The event was celebrated on the 5th and 6th of July in Bad Nauheim (Germany).
The presentation showed some research activities about the implementation of the Essential Work of Fracture (EWF) method to predict the failure event of innovative advanced high strength steels with a tensile strength of 980 and 1180 MPa, during forming operation. The results presented are part of related RFCS (Research Fund for Coal and Steel) projects such as Crash&Tough and CuttingEdge4.0.
Crash&Tough is a recently finished project where fracture toughness measurements were used to better understand the influence of microstructure on the fracture resistance and crashworthiness of 3rd Generation AHSS. During the conference, the presenters briefly discussed some of the main results obtained in the project related to the classification of the fracture performance of AHSS (for more details see the publication Fracture Resistance of Advanced High-Strength Steel Sheets for Automotive Applications | SpringerLink).
You can download the presentation delivered here:
The presentation also included some practical examples of how to apply the EWF method to predict edge fractures in real automotive components. The presented case studies were extracted from the ongoing project CuttingEdge4.0 where, among other predicting and analytical tools, new failure models for edge cracking prediction based on fracture mechanics have been further developed.
The event, attended by 78 professionals from 9 different countries, focused on the question of how to arrive at a climate neutral automotive production taking into account the CO2 footprint of the materials used across the entire supply chain. It gathered more than 80 enthusiastic automotive engineers from different countries.
