ABSTRACT
Traditionally, engineers performing crash analysis do not account for the forming-induced effects such as thinning and work hardening of sheet metals. This is due primarily to the fact that the forming simulation and subsequent mapping of the resulting gage and material hardening history to crash models are often difficult. There is a feeling among engineers that the forming effects do not influence the vehicle-level crash response significantly. Commercial application tools are now available to map forming simulation results into crash models and thereby allow engineers to explore in details the effect of forming on crash responses with relative ease. In this paper, we have used commercially available tools to perform forming simulation and subsequent mapping of results to crash model. Full vehicle-level crash analyses are performed with and without forming history and the results are compared. It is shown that there are cases where the inclusion of forming effects is critical to accurately predict crush modes and the responses.