AL-alloys sheet metals - advanced materials for application in car bodies

Abstract

During the last decades car industry has been going through an intensive development which integrates the latest achievements in science and technology. Development and usage of new materials for car industry, especially for car bodies, has been coordinated with general social demands, saving of economic resources, energy preservation and ecology, passengers safety etc. According to that, during the last few years materials for making car bodies of reduced weight have been more and more used, such as: high strength steel sheets, Al−sheet metals, titan and its alloys, taylored sheets, sandwich and composite materials and similar. Usage of Al−alloys makes possible the weight reduction, satisfying at the same time the demands for car body stiffnes, which reduces the consumption of fuel and makes space for additional building−in of active safety elements. However, due to reduced formability in relation to low carbon steel sheets metals, replacement and introduction of Al−alloys demands great technological coordination in the existing productive process, i.e. realization of completely new elements of the forming system. The aspect of choice of new materials are given in details in this paper, with particular retrospection to formability of classic and Al−alloys sheet metals by deep drawing.