RIAM Seminar: Challenges of Traditional Manufacturing Techniques - Metal Forming

Traditional manufacturing technologies for metals, such as metal-forming, casting (including additive manufacturing) and machining, are still the most commonly used methods in the overall global manufacturing sector. For examples, over 80% of car body and chassis structural components, 60% of gas-turbine engines, and over 70% of high-speed trains are manufactured using metal-forming technologies, which were developed 1000 years ago. These traditional manufacturing technologies are facing high challenges nowadays due to the new market requirements, such as higher quality, lower prices, light-weighting. We need to manufacture components with known microstructure distributions and known lifetimes. This presentation will introduce the global urgent requirements for innovative metal-forming technologies for producing high-strength, lightweight and complex-shaped engineering components for transportation vehicles for energy saving and CO2 emission reduction. A few examples of innovative metal-forming techniques and modelling methods, developed at Imperial’s Metal-Forming and Materials Modelling Group, will be presented, and future challenges will be given at the end of the presentation.