MIPRE

Development of a complex material model for press hardening of steel, covering mechanical, thermal and metallurgical factors to generate an accurate prediction of the final behaviour of the material.

The MiPre project has the objective to improve the accuracy of metallurgical and mechanical modelling to predict material properties in press hardening. Together with improvements in sensoring and process control, these advances will allow a further level of microstructural tailoring, leading to components with locally optimized properties.

The use of new press hardening technologies in combination with high strength metallurgical concepts is known to be a competitive solution to produce lightweight safety cage components for the automobile industry. Moreover, an integrated intelligent manufacturing approach in the context of Industry 4.0 offers further potential for online-generated quality control and traceability and precise local tailoring of mechanical properties. All of this requires precise digital transformation of the process.

The innovation developed by the project is based on the creation of an innovative complex material model covering mechanical, thermal and metallurgical factors. The Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit of Eurecat main contribution’s to this model is the generation of component crash performance data as a function of its thermo-mechanical process history, using a novel Essential Work of Fracture-based measurement methodology developed by the Unit.

The MiPre project is coordinated by National Center for Metallurgical Research CSIC-CENIM (Spain), and counts with the participation of the Institut Jean Lamour from the National Centre of the Recherche Scientifique (France), Luleå Technical University (Sweden), Gestamp-Autotech Engineering (Spain) and ArcelorMittal Research (France).