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Top1. Introduction
Today the auto industry is under a great pressure to come up with material savings to reduce the overall weight of the car. In the auto industry today we see a big competition amongst the OEMs and Manufacturers to do the same. A few design modifications or use of different size and grades of materials solves this problem to a great extent. There has been a tremendous amount of research carried out in past decade or so on different materials as well as different manufacturing processes. OEMs use different grades of steel and aluminum which constitute a major portion of the body of the car. The overall body consists of many parts and individual components but, ‘Body in White’ or ‘BIW’ refers to the stage in automobile manufacturing in which the car body sheet metal (including doors, hoods, and deck lids) has been assembled or designed but before the components (chassis, motor) and trim (windshields, seats, upholstery, electronics, etc.) have been added. The largest components of this BIW consist of ‘Body Inner’ and ‘Body Outer.’ There is one ‘Body Inner’ and one ‘Body Outer’ on each side of the car. It’s a one single component of sheet metal, starting from fender till the headlight-front bumper joint connection. As each section is a cut out of a large role of sheet metal, to reduce the scrap while manufacturing, OEMs has to come up with an optimum design. When we say optimum, it includes its strength, rigidity, elasticity, etc. which engineers needs to handle carefully while designing. Figure 1 shows a body-in-white (BIW) of a car.
In the literature, several studies are conducted for reducing weight. Salchow (2005) illustrated laser welded blanks for reducing weight and cost. In another article, Wilson (2003) mentioned that the steel industry offers solutions for an auto industry bent on trimming cost and weight using similar techniques. Anon (2002) used some laser welded tubular blanks for lighter car components. There are many similar studies could be found in the published research. Múnera et al. (2009) presented innovative press hardened steel based laser welded blanks solutions for weight reduction and safety improvement. In term of reliability of the methodology, Chien et al. (2003) showed failure prediction of aluminum laser-welded blanks. Dry et al. (2001) provided methodology of assessing influence of weld properties on formability of laser welded tailored blanks. Qiu et al. (2007) studies numerical simulation on laser tailor welded blanks stamping. In another study, Cheng et al. (2005) investigated weldability and forming behavior of alumni tailor-welded blanks. Xia et al. (2008) studies failure analysis on laser welds for dual phase steel. Finite-element simulation for stamping and application to the forming of laser-welded blanks illustrated overall improvement (Iwata et al., 1995). There are many benefits of using tailor-welded blanks in car design (Rooks, 2001; Assunção et al., 2009). Laser weld blanks methodology could provide needed fuel efficient car with weight reduction.