A quantitative relationship between assembly variations and material thickness variations is firstly given and a new variation model of compliant sheet metal assembly is presented to help designers to more exactly predict the assembly variation and diagnose variation sources.

The offset element is then applied to predict sheet metal assembly variation for one-dimensional (ID) models extracted from industrial practice. The first example evaluates the effects of sheet metal thicknesses on assembly variation. The second example shows how the assembly sequence affects assembly variation.

Variation in the incoming sheet material and fluctuations in the press setup is unavoidable in many stamping plants. The effect of these variations can have a large influence on the quality of the final stamping, in particular, unpredictable springback of the sheet when the tooling is removed.

This work presents a numerical study on the influence of variability in the mechanical properties of metal sheets in predicting the occurrence of springback and maximum thinning, for a sheet metal forming process. For this purpose, a mild steel was selected as reference material and the U-channel forming process was considered.

Key Words: analysis of variance, designed experiment, dynamic batch mean, sheet metal stamping, variation reduction 1. Introduction Most passenger vehicles produced today (automobiles, light trucks, and minivans) have a (structural) body that comprises 100–150 stamped metal panels. These panels range in