핫블로우 포밍을 이용한 고강도 알루미늄 루프 사이드 레일 설계 = Design of Roof Side Rail by Hot Blow Forming using High Strength Aluminum

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Recently, lightweight of automotive parts has been required to solve environmental problems caused by global warming. Accordingly, research and development are proceeded on manufacturing of parts using aluminum that can replace steel for lightweight of the automotive parts. In addition, high strength aluminum can be applied to body parts in order to meet both requirements of lightening and improving crash safety of vehicle. In this study, hot blow forming of roof side rail is employed to manufacturing of the automotive parts with high strength aluminum tube. In hot blow forming, longer forming times and excessive thinning can be occurred as compared with conventional manufacturing processes. So optimization of process conditions is required to prevent excessive thinning and to uniformize thickness distribution with fast forming time. Mechanical properties of high strength aluminum are obtained from tensile test at high temperature. These properties are used for finite element(FE) analysis to investigate the effect of strain rate on thinning and thickness distribution. Variation of thickness was firstly investigated from the result of FE analysis according to tube diameter, where the shapes at cross section of roof side rail are compared with allowable dimensional tolerance. Effective tube diameter is determined when fracture and wrinkle are not occurred during hot blow forming. Also FE analysis with various pressure-time profiles is performed to investigate the their effects on thinning and thickness distribution which is quantitatively verified with thinning factor. As a results, optimal process conditions can be determined for the manufacturing of roof side rail using high strength aluminum.