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Historically manufacturing variability has been considered as a noise factor due to limited insights about manufacturing history and its influence on part performance. With improvement in computational power and enhancements in commercial simulation tools, it is now feasible to study the influence of manufacturing process on product life in addition to manufacturability. This study demonstrates the concept of as manufactured part performance prediction utilizing forming simulation software to capture deformed geometry along with residual stresses and its integration to performance simulation tool using sheet drawing operation. Simulation predictions are verified and validated with available experimental data. This approach helps to visualize the variation in part performance with respect to manufacturing process change including process sequence, process parameters and tooling design change.

Forging is one of the traditional bulk metal forming processes used extensively in the automotive industry. Forging has a distinct advantage versus other metal manufacturing processes in terms of strength, grain orientation, reliability, near net shape with lower material utilization, and machining requirements leading to cost effectiveness, etc. Today, the automotive industry is going through the critical phase of reducing component costs through material reduction and optimized tool consumption. With this challenge, process modeling is gaining more momentum in the industry to optimize blank size and improve the tool life with required part quality, while also evaluating press tonnage requirements for effective equipment usage. It also enables integrated process modeling by understanding the microstructure, residual stress/deformation built into the manufactured part, and integrating with material property changes for subsequent part performance prediction.

Vapor management system is critical to manage fuel tank capacity, evaporative emissions and pressure control for hybrid applications. Due to stringent emission norms and other regulations there has been lot of advancements in design and application of vapor control valves that are used in automotive fuel tanks. Continuous exposure of these valves to fuel vapor or fuel in some instances led to swelling of assemblies and poses serious threat to product functionality and maintaining required tolerances. Swelling of plastics in fuel is ideally a case of multi physics, which involves modeling of complex mass transfer phenomena. In this study a simple thermal analogous approach has been used to model swelling behavior by characterizing the basic plastic-fuel soaking through coefficient of hygroscopic swelling. Extensive testing has been performed with multiple plastic-fuel combinations with different shapes at different temperatures.

Creep is responsible for creating time dependent changes in product dimensions and reducing strength that could affect the ability of products to resist design loads. Creep behavior is an important design consideration for polymers as this phenomenon is observed at very low temperatures compared to metals. Literature suggests many mathematical models to represent this complex creep phenomenon; however they are limited to most common polymers. Today's automotive industry is equipped with state of the art polymer materials considering specific design requirements from the stake holders. The current study is focused on the engine oil pan and its sealing requirements for the automotive business. Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) plays a very critical role in today's quest to reduce the design cycle and testing time.