Presse Info Press release Hot forming: Less weight, better ...

Presse Info
Press release
VOIT HOLDING GMBH & CO. KG
Astrid Wilhelm-Wagner
Manager Public Relations
& Marketing
Saarbrücker Strasse 2
66386 St. Ingbert
Tel: +49 68 94 909 - 245
Fax: +49 68 94 909 - 104
astrid.wilhelm-wagner@voit.de
www.voit.de
facebook.com/WillyVoit
Hot forming: Less weight, better performance
Body-in-white components with reduced weight and, at the same
time, high strength reduce fuel consumption and CO 2 emissions.
Components with maximum strength and simultaneous
weight reduction – the requirements of the automotive
industry are becoming ever more demanding.
Hot forming, also known as press forming or form
hardening is the method which best suits these requirements.
It is therefore increasingly used for body and
chassis parts such as side impact protection systems,
bumper reinforcement and for high-strength inflexible
structural components in the body-in-white. It is
increasingly substituting products which were previously
manufactured using cold forming techniques
and is paving the way for totally new applications.
The market is reacting with a keen demand. In the
current VW Passat, for example, eleven parts consist
of press hardened steel. Market trend: increasing
rapidly.
How does hot forming work?
The metal blanks to be formed pass through a continuous
furnace on a roller conveyor and are heated
to approx. 950°C. A robot lays the red hot plates in a
forming press which contains a special, water-cooled
die. As the press closes, the material is hydraulically
formed by the die at a temperature of around 750°C.
During the subsequent holding time, the plate is
cooled to remove the heat as quickly as possible. As a
result of fast cooling, the martensitic structure, which
leads to higher hardness values, forms in the steel.
The component achieves its ultimate shape in a
follow-up step. The extraordinary hardness of the
steel and its tensile strength of over 1,400 N/mm 2
make it difficult to carry out final cutting of the
components with conventional cutting equipment
and so 3D laser processing is recommended whereby
the final shape of the component is created from the
formed and hardened steel using a laser beam.
The advantages: Less weight, better performance
The advantages lie in the precise dimensional
stability with excellent reproducibility as well as
high strength and hardness values. And this along
with a component weight which has been reduced,
whilst having the same performance, by a significant
20 – 30%. As there is no spring-back effect with hot
forming, this process allows the manufacture of highly
complex, precise and dimensionally accurate parts
which could not be achieved in this way using the
cold-forming process. The technology offers potential
for high integration levels: a single complex and light
module is created out of several individual parts.
The crowning discipline in hot forming is known as
“tailored properties through tailored tempering” and
involves having various strengths and hardnesses
even within one individual component so that both
strength areas and crumple zones are feasible. In
principle, such components are interesting anywhere
“where moved mass uses energy” i.e. also in the fields
of railway technology and in aircraft construction.
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Presse Info
Press release
VOIT HOLDING GMBH & CO. KG
Astrid Wilhelm-Wagner
Manager Public Relations
& Marketing
Saarbrücker Strasse 2
66386 St. Ingbert
Tel: +49 68 94 909 - 245
Fax: +49 68 94 909 - 104
astrid.wilhelm-wagner@voit.de
www.voit.de
facebook.com/WillyVoit
Not many companies can master this technology and
capacities on the international market are correspondingly
in short supply. A new supplier within this
market is VOIT TPH – Technology for Press Hardening,
a spin-off of WILLY VOIT GmbH & Co. KG., which was
founded in 1947 (www.voit.de). The automotive
supplier with global operations has a workforce of
approximately 1,000 employees at its headquarters
in St. Ingbert (Germany) and over 1,600 employees
worldwide at six production locations in Germany,
France, Poland and Mexico. The portfolio is made up
of three business units – aluminum high-pressure diecasting,
cold-forming and hot-forming technology.
High-precision, high-pressure die-cast parts are developed
and produced according to customer specifications
with finally- processed and finished functional
surfaces as well as finished castings and components
using punching, drawing and roll-bending technology
and innovative light-weight components
using hot-forming technology. The range includes
complete solutions from engineering through toolmaking,
the foundry, punching shop and finishing
department to logistics. Over 170 million parts are
fitted in the world’s most popular cars such as Audi,
BMW, Ford, Jaguar, Landrover, Mercedes, Opel, VW,
Porsche.... VOIT expertise and products are in high
demand on the market and are installed in more than
50% of cars. The company is also committed to the
fields of greentech and electro mobility.
In the field of hot-forming, VOIT is focusing on large
scale production. The first facility may soon be
followed by others. A capacity of up to three million
passes is to be available within the next three years.
Depending on growth forecasts, a total of six facilities
are planned for the next few years. It would then
be possible to produce between six and ten million
parts a year. The new hot-forming technology at
VOIT is a courageous step in the right direction as it
meets the OEM’s need for light and simultaneously
high-strength car body parts which therefore offer
a high degree of safety. As a result of the significant
reduction in the vehicle weight, they are ultimately
able to offer their customers concrete advantages
with regard to lower fuel consumption and reduced
CO 2 emissions.