New Heat Treatment Technologies for Aluminum Automotive Body Structures

As automobile manufactures today push the envelope of light weighting technologies so do they create  opportunities for development of new heat treatment technologies.  Today we see a common trend where steel components are replaced with aluminum components.  The use of aluminum components in automobiles does come with its challenges and for the purpose of this paper we will focus on the heat treatment processes used to develop the components physical properties.  Although we have witnessed these changes for over 20 years, today we find aluminum making its way into new areas of the automobile that include structural and more recently body products.  This paper examines the thermal processing options available to manufacturers of body components and the technical challenges associated with developing these new processes.  This paper will discuss and compare newly developed thermal system concepts and features how they can be integrated into high volume automotive manufacturing process.