Abstract
Due to the recent needs for weight reduction in automotive industry, the hot stamping became a promising process to replace the classical press forming technology to form complex, high strength components. In the hot stamping process, the mechanical properties and accuracy of the final products are strongly dependent on temperature, cooling rate, time and so on. In this paper, the cooling time was selected as a key process parameter for the stamping of Coupled Torsion Beam Axle (CTBA) part and it was optimized using the finite element analysis which takes the deformation and strengthening induced by the cooling and phase transformation into account. Finally, the developed FE procedure was applied to the optimization of new cooling channel design of CTBA with different gage thickness, but maintaining cooling capacity with already manufactured CTBA as a reference.
