Technical Paper
Comparison of Bake Hardening Effects on AHSSs and Extruded Aluminum Alloys Applied in BEV Reinforcement Structures
2024-04-09
2024-01-2240
At the dawn of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), protection of automotive battery systems as well as passengers, especially from severe side impact, has become one of the latest and most challenging topics in the BEV crashworthiness designs. Accordingly, two material-selection concepts are being justified by the automotive industry: either heavy-gauge extruded aluminum alloys or light-gauge advanced high-strength steels (AHSSs) shall be the optimal materials to fabricate the reinforcement structures to satisfy both the safety and lightweight requirements. In the meantime, such a justification also motivated an ongoing C-STARTM (Cliffs Steel Tube as Reinforcement) Protection project, in which the all-AHSS(s) reinforcement beams, essentially a series of modularized steel tube assemblies, were demonstrated both experimentally and virtually to be more cost-efficient, sustainable, design-flexible, and manufacturable than the equivalent extruded aluminum alloy beams.