Study of die cast magnesium components for crash safety

Abstract In this paper, AM60 magnesium die cast components are studied to understand material property variation, fracture behaviour and finite element simulation. The magnesium IP beam is selected for material characterization and fracture behaviour study. It is shown that maximum plastic strain of the component varies from 3% to 11% while the standard sample has 6% elongation. The material laws with failure criterion in Radioss Crash are studied to understand failure definitions and their mathematical forms for calculation. Specimens are tested and simulated under different loading conditions including standard coupon tension, wider specimen tension and dome forming test. It is found that failure strain obtained from standard tensile test cannot be used to predict failures in wider specimen tension and dome forming tests. The simulation underestimates the failure strains and overestimates the loading capacity of magnesium specimens. It requires a modification on material input to obtain good correlation with all the applicable tests. The study suggests that when the material law is set to parameter determined from uniaxial tension tests, damage parameters may need to be included in material definitions for AM60.