Automotive Skin Panels Quality Improvement by Means of Finite Element Method 2013-36-0194
In the middle of the global competition, inside the automotive sector, the perceived quality of costumers, related to the beauty and harmony of the outer skin surfaces of motor vehicles, has become one of the main determinant factors in the purchase process decision.
In general, the initial perceived quality of a car is determined by an appealing design of its body, the color and gloss of its paint, and also the manufacturing and assembly accuracy of the skin panels.
The appealing design makes the skin panel even more complex and hard to produce with current metal forming technologies and the results are often small distortions on the outer surfaces about tens of microns and most of the times paint does not cover such imperfections.
Despite the technological advances along the years, surface quality inspection was still being performed by manual and subjective evaluation by experts.
Three characteristic distortions are usually cited by academic researches: Die Radius Impact Mark; Punch Radius Skid Mark, and Sink Mark due to complexity of skin panel geometry. These marks, depends on its magnitude requires a metal finishing along the production line which penalize the cost, quality, speed and time.
As the skin panels of the vehicles are manufactured by means of stamping process, all the distortions that arise on the surfaces came from this process, so that it is vital to improve the skill, knowledge and methodology in using adequate Finite Element simulation resources in order to be able to predict and correct in advance phase of car development such problems.
This article aims to present a simulation methodology and analysis to detect first type of defect (Die Radius Impact mark) by means of FE simulation.
The scientific methodology used in this paper is a comparison between simulation results, obtained by FEM and real measurements.
