Experimental verification of tailor welded joining partners for hot stamping and analytical modeling of TWBs rheological constitutive in austenitic state

Hot stamping of quenchable ultra high strength steels currently represents a standard forming technology in the automotive industry for the manufacture of safety and crash relevant components. Recently, hot stamping of Tailor-Welded Blanks (TWBs) is proposed to meet the environmental and safety requirements by supplying car structural body components with functionally optimized and tailored mechanical properties. In this paper, an appropriate partner material for the quenchenable boron steel B1500HS based on the phase transformation and deformation behavior under process relevant conditions is determined. It is generally accepted that the mechanical properties for joint partner after quenching process should meet the following requirements. The value of yield strength (YS) should be between 350 and 500 MPa. The ultimate tensile strength (UTS) should be within the limits of 500–650 MPa, and the total elongation (TEL) until rupture should be higher than 13%. Two kinds of High Strength Low Alloy (HSLA) cold rolled steels B340LA and B410LA are chosen for verification of which one is appropriate as joint partner. Microhardness is measured and metallographic is investigated on different base materials and corresponding weld seams. It is pointed out that the B340LA steel is an appropriate joint partner with ideal thermal and mechanical properties. An optimized Arrhenius constitutive law is implemented to improve the characterization and description of the mechanical properties of the base and joint partner, as well as the weld seam in austenitic state. The comparisons with simplified Hensel–Spittel constitutive model show the optimized Arrhenius constitutive law describes the experimental data fairly well.