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Materials and Design

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The study on the fatigue FEM analysis considering the effect of stamping
Wang Wu-rong a,*, Chen Guanlong a, Lin Zhong-qin a,b
a
Auto Body Manufacturing Technology Center, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai JiaoTong University, Shanghai 200240, China
b
State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai JiaoTong University, Shanghai 200240, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The fatigue FEM analysis normally cannot inherit the stamping effects due to heterogeneous codes used.
Received 27 May 2008 This paper proposes a database modication approach to integrate the stamping effects into the fatigue
Accepted 21 July 2008 FEM prediction for an engine bracket in an accelerated rig test. Equal thickness shell, unequal thickness
Available online xxxx
shell (including the stamping effects) and solid element are used to simulate the tubular bracket in the
fatigue analysis. Results obtained from the comparison between the numerical predictions and the exper-
Keywords: iment show that considering the stamping effects would increase the predicted fatigue life greatly and
Stamping and punching (C)
also improve the accuracy of the fatigue FEM prediction.
Fatigue (E)
Plastic behavior (F)
2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction shown that the effects of thinning and stress/strain hardening

During sheet or tube steel stamping, lots of physical phenomena
occur with the transformation of shape. The thickness variation is
the most obvious effect which induces thickening and thinning in
the deformation area; other effects such as residual stress and
strain hardening also take place. All these effects have an inuence
on the subsequent structural analysis such as structural strength
evaluation, stiffness evaluation and fatigue life prediction. Tradi-
tionally, the FEM designer does not take these effects into consid-
eration. Even the thickness variations which can reach
approximately 20% of original nominal thickness are neglected.
Several secondary effects of stamping are classied according to
their inuence on the behavior of the part in service, on its fatigue
life and therefore on weight saving [1].
The technical reason why equal nominal thickness and zero
hardening are normally set to simulate the manufactured part in
fatigue analysis is the heterogeneous codes used in the stamping
simulation and the fatigue analysis. Due to the non-linearity (geo-
metric by virtue of the large deformations and strains involved,
material by virtue of the plastic deformation, and boundary since
complex contact is involved) accompanying with the stamping
process, the numerical simulation of stamping requires a non-lin-
ear FEM code, like LS-Dyna. While for structural FEM analysis, an-
other type of FEM code like MSC Nastran and Fatigue is normally
used. The different data organization used in these two types of
FEM analysis makes it difcult to obtain the stamping effects and
further apply these effects in the subsequent fatigue life prediction.
However, well founded experimental researches listed below have
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 21 3420 6521; fax: +86 21 3420 4542.
E-mail address: wangwurong@sjtu.edu.cn (W.-r. Wang).
caused by the stamping manufacturing process obviously have a
signicant inuence on the fatigue life. Khan and Hadeld [2]
presented their experimental results of the residual stress mea-
surements on the failed ceramic elements and concluded that the
compressive residual stress inverse relationship to Hertzian con-
tact stress during rolling contact of the lubricated ceramic bearing
elements helps enhancing the fatigue lives of these bearing ele-
ments. Similar research was conducted by Chien et al. [3] to under-
stand the inuence of the residual stresses induced by the llet
rolling process on the fatigue process of a ductile cast iron crank-
shaft section under bending. Han et al. [4] also reported the inu-
ence of sheet pre-straining on the static and fatigue behavior of
self-piercing riveted aluminum alloy sheet and the results showed
that by increasing the pre-straining level up to 10%, the shear and
fatigue strength were also increased. Ryosuke et al. [5] investigated
the inuence of strain ratio on the bending fatigue properties of
TiNi shape-memory alloy thin wires and the process of the fatigue
crack propagation. Costa et al. [6] performed the tests in pure
rotating bending with and without steady torsion and investigated
the fatigue behavior of tubular AlMgSi welded specimens sub-
jected to the biaxial loading.
Besides the above experimental investigation, researchers have
also made a great effort to predict the fatigue life by numerical ap-
proach. Zapatero et al. [7] employed the nite element method
(FEM) numerical tool to explore the inuence of three factors
(the maximum load, the crack length and the stress ratio) on the
fatigue crack closure. Nagapadmaja et al. [8] presented the details
of the fatigue crack propagation analysis for tube elbows based on
the code procedure and FEM. Li et al. [9] dealt with the simulation
for the cyclic stress/strain evolutions and the evaluation of fatigue
parameters suitable for estimating fatigue lives under multi-axial

0261-3069/$ - see front matter 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

doi:10.1016/j.matdes.2008.07.046

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Table 1 shell element, the unequal thickness shell element (including the
Mechanical properties of AISI 303 stainless steel stamping inuence) and the solid element. The approach to include
Parameter Denotation Amplitude the stamping effects will also be presented in these two sections.
Density q(kg/m )3
7850 Subsequently in Section 4, the fatigue life predicted by FEM analy-
Tensile strength rb(MPa) 625 sis will be compared against the experimental result of the rig test.
Yield strength rs (MPa) 330 Finally in Section 5, principal conclusions and future work are
Youngs modulus E (GPa) 178 outlined.
Poisson rate k 0.3
Elongation at break ds 0.58
Strength coefcient K (MPa) 2450 2. Stamping effects of the engine bracket
Strain hardening exponent n 0.35
Cyclic yield strength rs,cyclic (MPa) 310
The case selected in this study is an engine bracket for a passen-
0
Fatigue strength coefcient r f (MPa) 534
Fatigue strength exponent c 0.07
ger car. The bracket is manufactured from a straight tube. The ori-
Fatigue ductility coefcient
0
ef 0.052 ginal blank is a stainless steel tube, AISI 303. The mechanical
Fatigue ductility exponent b 0.292 properties obtained by the experimental test are shown in Table 1
and the original nominal thickness is 3.5 mm. The stamping pro-
cess used here is the CNC bending. The popular non-linear explicit
loadings. This research concluded that the improvement of the fa- FEM code, LS-Dyna, is used to simulate this stamping process.
tigue life prediction depended not only on the fatigue damage The shell element representing the mid-surface of the tube is
models, but also on the accurate evaluations of the cyclic elastic used in the simulation of the stamping process for the consider-
plastic stress/strain responses. ation of time saving. The focus of this study is to include the stamp-
In short, experimental investigations showed the effects of ing effects of thickness variation and plastic strain in the
stamping on fatigue life. However, current FEM researches nor- subsequent fatigue FEM model. Hence, the contours of thickness
mally didnt inherit these effects into consideration for fatigue pre- and plastic strain for the stamped tube are illustrated in Figs. 1
diction. The objective of this study is to perform the fatigue FEM and 2. Fig. 1 shows that most of the stamped part remains as the
analysis inheriting the effects of stamping (the thickness variation original thickness except the deformation area at the bending cor-
and plastic hardening). This research will be conducted in six ners. The maximum thinning and thickening occur at the inner and
phases as follows: Phase 1: conduct literature review; Phase 2: se- outer side of the bending corner near the shorter elbow, respec-
lect research case; Phase 3: analyze the input deck of popular com- tively. Both the variations reach approximately 12.8% of the origi-
mercial FEM code for the stamping simulation and the fatigue nal nominal thickness. From Fig. 2, it could be seen that the plastic
analysis; Phase 4: develop an approach for the fatigue analysis hardening also centralizes at the bending corners of the tube and
FEM code to integrate the stamping effects; Phase 5: conduct the maximum effective stain reaches 0.22.
experiment for the selected case and validate the approach; Phase For inheriting the stamping effects in the subsequent fatigue
6: deliver research results. analysis, the important operation is to enable the plot of the nal
The paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, the secondary result in ASCII text format. By default, FEM software only provides
physical phenomena of the tubular engine bracket generated from a binary output, which is encrypted and could only be read by cer-
the stamping process is briey described. Section 3 covers the fati- tain post-process software specially designed. To get around this
gue FEM modeling in three types of elements, the equal thickness problem, the Dynain [10] output keyword has been implemented

Fig. 1. Thickness variation of the stamped tube.

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Fig. 2. Effective plastic strain of the stamped tube.

in the LS-Dyna input deck of the stamping simulation. With this
feature, a Dynain le containing the node and element deni-
tions, the thickness of each element and the stressstrain state will
be written in text format at the end of the simulation. This Dyn-
ain le could be read by the general pre-process FEM software.
Then a Nastran format le should be resaved from this Dynain
input. This Nastran le only contains the node and element infor-
mation of the nal stamped tube and will be used for part import-
ing in the subsequent fatigue analysis.
3. Fatigue FEM analysis for the engine bracket
In this study, an accelerated rig test scenario is utilized to eval-
uate the structural design of the engine bracket. The assembly of
the rig test consists of the stamped tube, the bracket tube cradles
and the bracket tube mounts. Fig. 3 shows the assembly built with
the nite element meshing. The cradles are xed on the rig trestle
table and hence full constraint is applied on these four cradles. The
bracket tube mounts are for loading the engine in the future.
Therefore, these are the positions where the loads are applied. In
the modeling, the mounts handles are connected via a rod element
and the loads are applied on the rod elements along the z-direc-
tion. As for connecting between the cradles, the mounts and the
stamped tube, rigid bonding is utilized since they are bound to-
gether by wire welding.
As is mentioned in the introduction, three types of elements
have been used in this study and they are equal thickness shell ele-
ment, unequal thickness shell element and solid element. For both
the equal thickness shell element and the solid element, the
meshes of the bracket tube are generated from the geometry of
the original product design. For the unequal thickness shell
element to include the stamping effects, the tube is imported from
the Nastran le resaved from the Dynain output of the stamp-
ing simulation. At rst, nominal thickness and zero hardening will
have to be set via the pre-process software to generate an input
deck that could pass the integrity checking for the fatigue analysis.
Then a text le of the input deck should be requested instead
of submitting to analysis directly. Finally, the thickness and

Fig. 3. Finite element meshing assembly of the fatigue analysis for the engine bracket.

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stressstrain state of each element in the Dynain le output from

the stamping simulation should be read out to replace the original
denition for the same element in the fatigue analysis input deck.
This replacement could easily be realized via simple programming
as both the Dynain le and the fatigue input deck are in text for-
mat. This revised input deck could be submitted to MSC Fatigue
console for the fatigue life calculation integrating the stamping
effects.
Another input for this fatigue FEM analysis is the cyclic loading
path which is collected from the strain gauges sticking on the
mounts in the eld test. The extreme one second is selected from
the eld recording and applied in the FEM analysis. Fig. 4 shows
the cyclic loading path on the mounts where the loads are applied.
Kinematic hardening model with von Mises yield criterion is ap-
plied in this study to simulate the stress/strain responses for the gi-
ven cyclic loading path.

4. Results and discussion

The analysis is run on a workstation operating on windows XP

Fig. 4. Cyclic loading path for the fatigue analysis. SP2 OS with Pentium D 2.0 Ghz CPU and 4 G RAM. When the shell
elements are used, the computing time consumed for the equal
thickness and the unequal shell is 460 and 479 s, respectively.

Fig. 5. Predicted fatigue life with the equal thickness shell element.

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Fig. 6. Predicted fatigue life with the unequal thickness shell element.

While for the solid element, the calculation takes 5012 s and it is
around ten times of the time consumed by the shell elements.
Fig. 5 shows the predicted fatigue life of the rig test using the
equal thickness shell element. The fatigue crack occurs at the bend-
ing corners of the tube and initiates at the top side of the corner
near the longer elbow with a fatigue life of 4.08e5 s.
Fig. 6 illustrates the predicted fatigue life of the rig test using
the unequal thickness shell element including the stamping effects.
The fatigue crack also occurs at the bending corners of the stamped
tube. Unlike the prediction with the equal thickness shell, the crack
initiates at the bottom side of the corner near the shorter elbow.
The lowest fatigue life at this broken location is 6.11e5 s, which
tells the total stamping effects increases the fatigue life signi-
cantly. This also indicates that though the thinning at the bending
corner may decrease the fatigue life, the strain hardening effect
from the stamping process could increase the fatigue strength
greatly at the critical locations. It is interesting that this corre-
sponds well with the previously published experimental investiga-
tions [24].
Fig. 7 shows the predicted fatigue life of the rig test using the
solid element. Similar as the simulation with the shell element,
the fatigue crack also occurs at the bending corners of the tube.
However, the crack initiates at the bottom side of the corner near
the longer elbow with a fatigue life of 3.8e5 s.
To verify the FEM prediction, the experimental rig test has been
conducted and shown in Fig. 8. And the fatigue crack initiates at
the bottom side of the corner near the shorter elbow with a fatigue
life of 5.5e5. By the correlation analysis of the FEM predictions and
the experimental test, it is noted that though all the simulations
predict the crack occurrence at the same location of the experi-
ment test, the exact location of lowest life are different from each
analysis. The fatigue prediction using the unequal thickness shell
element (including the effects of stamping) proves to give the cor-
rect location with the lowest fatigue life. Moreover, the analysis re-
sults listed in Table 2 show that just for the fatigue life at the
broken location of the experimental test, the fatigue life of the un-
equal thickness shell element (including the effects of stamping) is
more close to that of the rig test, which is near the result of the so-
lid element; the fatigue life of the equal thickness shell element is
far from that of the rig test.
5. Conclusions and future work
This paper conducts the study on the fatigue FEM analysis con-
sidering the effect of stamping. A database modication approach
has been proposed to revise the input deck of Fatigue FEM analysis
for inheriting stamping effect from the result of LS-Dyna stamping
simulation. By integrating these two domains-independent CAE

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Fig. 7. Predicted fatigue life with the solid element.

Fig. 8. Experimental result of the rig test.

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Table 2
Fatigue life comparison at the fracture location
Equal thickness shell element
Considering the effects of stamping? No
Fatigue life Rig test 549,545
FEM Prediction 836,000
tools, the thickness and the plastic hardening effects generated
from stamping can be imported into the fatigue analysis
environment.
Three different types of elements are modeled for the engine
bracket rig test and compared in terms of the consumed time,
the crack initiation location and the predicted fatigue life. The work
hardening effect from the stamping process which is included into
the unequal thickness shell element could increase the fatigue life
signicantly, up to 50% and 60% when compared to predictions
with the equal shell thickness element and the solid element,
respectively. At the crack initiation location of the experimental
rig test, the unequal thickness shell element including the stamp-
ing effects proves to have the minimum difference from the exper-
imental fatigue life at a cost of 10% time than the solid element.
Through this example, one can clearly see the contribution of the
proposed approach to the accuracy of the fatigue prediction.
It should also be emphasized that the proposed approach are
generally applicable to a variety of other structural properties anal-
ysis such as strength, stiffness, dent-resistance and crashworthi-
ness. In the future work, the authors wish to extend the
proposed approach in some of the above elds to examine the con-
tribution of considering the stamping effects on the accuracy of
these properties analysis.
Acknowledgements
Financial support from the China Postdoctoral Science Founda-
tion and National Science Foundation of China (973 Program, No.
2006CB705400) is greatly acknowledged.
Please cite this article in press as: Wang W-r et al., The study on the fatigue FEM analysis considering the effect of stamping, J Mater
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7
Unequal thickness shell element Solid element
Yes No
611,000 636,000
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