Material variability effects on automotive part production process

Abstract The current efforts to reduce the carbon footprint throughout the chain in the automotive industry by increased use of recycled materials poses new challenges for materials production and their use. The increase of steel scrap fraction in the current primary steel making processes, used for producing steel sheet metal for automotive components, possibly affects the material properties variability beyond the limits observed in the materials produced today despite mitigating actions in steel production. In this paper material variability increase was modelled by selecting deterministic values outside the range of the material grade used to design and manufacture an automotive part. The values were selected from an experimental data set representing the cold rolled mild steels material class range. The effects were studied numerically on a reverse engineered model of an existing automotive part production process. It was found that the manufacturing feasibility in this particular case is mainly affected by the weighted average plastic strain ratio and less by the degree of planar anisotropy.