Development of a New Gradient Based Strain-Criterion for Prediction of Bendability in Quality Assurance and FEA.

Numerical simulation systems are more and more used in process development of car bodies. Nowadays, also the hemming process is optimised in FEA. Thus, the analysing of process robustness calls for a failure criterion for the specific bending and hemming load condition. For that purpose the experimental determination of bendability under various pre-load conditions that occur in real production, e.g. during deep drawing in press shop, is content of this contribution. Using these experimental results, a new approach for a strain-gradient based failure criterion for bending operations is presented to optimise bendability prediction. The bending-strain-gradient approach can be used both in production related departments of quality assurance as well as for simulative process design or process validation for vehicle manufacturing planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]