Finite element analysis predicts press forming of coated products made from thin steel sheets
The European Commission, Directorate General XII, has recently published a report entitled "Modelling and verification of forming of coated thin steel sheet products incorporating frictional slip behaviour between press tool and workpiece". It is one in a series of ten reports on properties and in-service performance in the field of technical steel research. The report concludes that finite element analysis can be used to give accurate predictions of the press forming of coated steels, providing that an accurate description of the frictional characteristics of the whole system is incorporated into the models. The authors suggest that future work in this field would benefit from focusing on experiments to determine if a simpler alternative approach could be applied to systems other than those studied within this particular project.