Relevance of forming processes on crash performance of body-in-white structural parts

The production process of car structural components can affect their crashworthiness owing to the introduction of modifications in the material characteristics during the sheet metal forming process. The deep drawing and the subsequent operations induce material work hardening, sheet thickness variation and geometry variation. Such modifications are not uniformly distributed and may relevantly affect local features. As a consequence, the forming process of a component results to have an impact on the vehicle crashworthiness