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The Automotive Industry is a leading force seeking innovative solutions towards the weight reduction, safety regulations compliances and costs reduction. These directs the Automotive players in the development of several fields, from materials, manufacturing process, product development and others, to work as close as possible to reach improved and cheaper products in less time. In the past decade, strong efforts were made in the material science, namely in new steel products, such as: Multi-phase Steels; Boron Steels; Martensitic Steels; Twip Steels. In parallel to the material science progresses, the manufacturing processes were evolved as well. In this field, to comply the nowadays complexity and the high resistance of the demanding new Automotive structural parts, several manufacturing processes were improved and implement: Hydroforming; Rollforming; Hotforming; Tailor Welded Blanks; Joining technologies.

In the past few years the automotive industry has shown an increasing concern on safety issues and predicting the right behavior of vehicle structures under crash situations has been a great preoccupation. CAE has a major role in crash validations, especially when predicting the rupture of fuel tanks, since avoiding any leaks has a great importance on the occupant's safety. Crash simulation of fuel tanks is a standard when developing this kind of product. However, with the increasing demand on more accurate models, new necessities appear. Accounting for the changes that the fabrication process makes on material properties is beginning to be a reality, especially with metal forming that brings local thinning and residual stresses to the fuel tank. In an attempt to build a more accurate model and to study the effect of local changes of material properties on the output of a crash analysis, this paper combines stamping and crash simulations.