Abstract: In forming process of tailor welded blanks(TWBs), weld-line movement leads to the inconsistency between the design weld-line and the actual weld-line. Therefore, aimed at the deep drawing process of TWBs, a weld-line compensating approach based on pre-offset is proposed, which employs the incremental finite element method(FEM) solver. A mesh model for FEM analysis is created. By comparing the difference between the designed and the formed weld-line, an estimation method is deducted. An optimization model is established, in which the nodal pre-offsets of the weld-line are selected as design variables and the minimum deviation between the designed and formed weld-lines is selected as the objective function. The weld-line movement during the forming process is compensated through FEM iterative solving, thus reaching a positional agreement between the formed weld-line and the designed one. An example shows the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Key words: Compensation, Finite element method, Optimization, Tailor-welded blanks, Weld-line