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With increasingly severe environmental problems, energy saving and environmental protection have become two important issues to be solved in the automobile industry. Patchwork blank hot-stamping technology can be used to obtain light-weight and high-strength parts and is thus increasingly used in the manufacture of autobody parts. Because the main blank and the patched blank need to be connected through spot welding before forming, the welding spots’ arrangement has a great influence on the formability of the part. In this study, a thermal–mechanical coupling finite element analysis model of A-pillar patchwork blanks was established. With the thickness of the patched blank, the distance between the welding spot and the external contour of the patched blank, and the number of welding spots as optimization variables, together with the maximum thinning rate and the maximum welding spot force as objectives, the influence of welding spot arrangement on forming quality was analyzed, and the welding spots’ arrangement was optimized using a central composite design (CCD), the response surface method (RSM), and the genetic algorithm (GA). The results showed that when the initial welding spot was located close to the contour of the patched blank, the bending moment was greater when the weld spot passed through the die corner, leading to the rupture of the welding spot or its surrounding base material due to the greater thinning rate. When the patched blank was thicker than the main blank, the main blank cracked during the forming process due to a greater increase in the thinning rate. The optimal solution of the weld spot arrangement on the A-pillar patchwork blanks was a 1.2 mm thick main blank, 0.8 mm thick patched blank, a distance of 29 mm between the weld spot and the contour line of the patched blank, and 16 weld spots. Hot-stamping experiments were conducted using the optimized weld spots’ arrangement, and high-quality parts were obtained. Full article

Insufficient strength of welding spots is a common problem in the hot stamping process of ultra-high strength steel patchwork blanks (UHSSP). In this paper, the welding spots of 22MnB5 boron steel with thicknesses of 1.2 and 1.5 mm were austenitized and then air-cooled to 650–850 °C for high temperature tensile shear tests and high temperature cross-tension tests, respectively. To study the mechanical properties of the welding spots at room temperature after heat treatment, the austenitized welding spots were quenched in cold water to room temperature, and microhardness tests and microstructure observations were performed. The results indicated that compared to the original welding spots, the heat-affected softening zone disappeared after heat treatment, and the hardness values of the fusion zone, heat-affected zone and base material were basically the same, at about 500 HV. After heat treatment, the welding spots were mainly martensite. With the increase in deformation temperature, the peak loads of the tensile shear and the cross tension of the welding spots decreased. At 750 °C, the peak loads of the welding spots decreased less, energy absorption was larger, and the welding spots had the comprehensive mechanical properties of strength and ductility. Full article