AutoForm-OneStep^®

Software for Engineering Manufacturable Sheet Metal Parts

Achieving and exceeding cost, quality and time targets on a vehicle program are vital to healthy profitability; dictated by today’s highly competitive marketplace, these targets are more aggressive than ever before. Designing and engineering parts right the first time is no longer just desirable, but essential to success. The “right” design has to satisfy aggressive styling, packaging, weight and performance requirements while being manufacturable to adequate and reliable quality, at reasonable cost.

AutoForm-OneStep provides, from very early on in the product development program, crucial and “real time” assistance to designers / design engineers:

• In making the right choices on crucial design elements by identifying formability hot spots,
• By validating formability based on proposed or plausible stamping layouts, and
• In assessing the relative cost of design and material choices.

AutoForm-OneStep has numerous application opportunities over the product development cycle, ranging from product formability engineering through material cost optimization to early assistance in die and process layout. The diversity of applications and of users, namely product designers and engineers, process and die face designers, material and die cost estimators, is made possible by the ease of usage of AutoForm-OneStep, and by the relative simplicity of data required to run AutoForm-OneStep simulations.

Listed below are the business and engineering benefits that derive from the typical applications of AutoForm-OneStep; these benefits highlight both the versatility of AutoForm-OneStep, and the extendibility of its application through carefully designed integration between AutoForm modules:

• Product engineering
  - Part formability validation, from early on until product release
  - Design studies to evaluate alternative part designs
  - Design studies to evaluate alternative material type/grade and gage
  - Thickness mapping for downstream CAE - crash, durability, NVH
• Material and die cost estimation
  - Material / part cost estimation and optimization
  - Die cost estimation based on formability assessment and blank
  - Material grade and gage selection for optimal cost / performance
• Preliminary die face and process engineering
  - Single- versus multi-stage forming
  - Single stamping vs. double-attached (1-off versus 2-off stamping layouts)
  - Optimal die tip

Besides the above application areas, AutoForm-OneStep complements the application of AutoForm-DieDesigner and AutoForm-Incremental^plus through accurate blank development necessary for process planning and optimization.

The following are a few of the prominent features of AutoForm-OneStep:

• Ideal for “real time” design studies by part designers
• Unique and proven application methodology embedded in intuitive set up wizard
• Simulation based on part or full tool geometry
• Automatic / interactive die tip evaluation
• Simulation of forming from flat and wrapped blank
• Simulation of parts with tailor-weld lines
• Automatic mapping of forming results on to application-specific models for
  crash / safety, NVH, durability and other CAE analyses
• Extensive generic materials library for initial studies
• Development and export of accurate blank outline
• Optimal embedding of developed blank on coil stock
• Tolerant of gaps / overlaps, sharp edges, holes in imported part geometry
• Automatic global filleting of sharp edges
• Geometry import from a wide variety of data formats